Description

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2025

The knock on the door changed everything. Until then, we were happy; we knew who we were. ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ I told him. ‘My wife is gentle and kind. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

In 1939, when she was just nineteen years old, Hermine Braunsteiner applied for a job in a new prison opening near her home. She had heard the pay was better than working on the factory line. The prison was called Ravensbruck.

A few months later, the Second World War would break like a wave across Europe. By the time it was over, she had become one of the most notoriously cruel and violent guards in the Nazi death camps. The prisoners nicknamed her the Mare – she was known for kicking her victims to death.

After the war, Hermine disappeared back into civilian life. A few years later she met a US war veteran who was holidaying in Europe. He had no idea who she was. He fell in love with her, married her and brought her back to America, where she lived for years as a well-liked suburban housewife, until one day a tip-off from a Holocaust survivor sent a New York Times journalist to her door, and the questions started.

Based on a true story, The Mare offers a gripping portrait of the descent of ordinary people into inhumanity. And it asks what happens after that nadir. It considers the impossible task of defining justice in the face of a crime which involved everyone, and weighs the moral necessity of reckoning with the truth against the overwhelming urge to look away. Absolutely unflinching and charged with urgent contemporary relevance, The Mare examines how we attempt to justify the unjustifiable – and forgive the unforgivable.

Publisher Review

Slowly, slowly, you are drawn into the nightmare, until unspeakable horror becomes everyday routine. This is a story so profound and yet so readable, I can only stand in awe of Angharad Hampshire. A landmark book — Rory Clements, author of ‘Evil in High Places’ Fascinating, compelling, extraordinary . . . It explores how an ordinary woman could descend so quickly into evil and also the role played by government propaganda, ideology, fear and cognitive dissonance * BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour * Ingenious and thought-provoking, The Mare has the quality of a nightmarish fable, a continuous battle between deception and self-deception, rocking back and forth in time through the eyes of its protagonists — Derek Niemann, author of ‘A Nazi in the Family’ A brutal, brilliant novel. Angharad Hampshire’s precise storytelling moves us in steady increments towards inevitable horror, forcing the reader to question both our conception of the monstrous, exceptional ‘other’ and the reliability of our own moral compass. Genius — Karen Powell, author of ‘Fifteen Wild Decembers’