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 Ravensbrück.

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.

"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

"A clever, dark story which is not for the faint-hearted. Hampshire writes so deftly it is hard to believe that this is her first novel. Many books purport to explain how apparently harmless people became monsters under the Third Reich, but I've never read one which comes this close to demonstrating exactly how that can happen" - Spectator

"[A] haunting debut novel... [It] offers nuance through shifting perspectives, highlight's humanity's violent capabilities and concluding that the true horror is found not in the reader's similarity to the victims but our similarity to the perpetrators" - Gazette & Herald

"A powerful and uncomfortable read" - Prima