Watership Down
#2454.08 in the official ranking · full ranking
Books 1 book Status Complete 1972 Reading commitment Low Richard Adams Last reviewed 2026-08-27
Overview
A warren of rabbits flees the destruction of their home and searches for a new one, guided partly by a young rabbit's premonitions and partly by their own inner mythology: stories of their trickster folk hero, El-ahrairah, told and retold throughout the journey. Richard Adams grounds the story in closely observed rabbit behavior while giving the warren its own fully realized language, social structure, and oral tradition. Rejected by seven publishers before its 1972 release, the novel became an immediate bestseller and won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize that year, later placing 42nd in a 2003 BBC public poll of the greatest books of all time. Martin Rosen's 1978 animated film adaptation, featuring John Hurt and Richard Briers, produced the UK number-one hit song "Bright Eyes," and the story was later adapted into a 1999-2001 animated television series and a 2018 BBC/Netflix co-production voiced by James McAvoy, John Boyega, and Ben Kingsley.
Mythic fantasy · For All ages
Core Canon: Reading Order (1 work) counts toward ranking
Watership Down Richard Adams
| Work | Year | Canon | Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Watership Down | 1972 | core | 4.08 (474,284 ratings) |
Richard Adams's own novel, the whole of the original narrative.
Library / Expanded (1 work)
Tales from Watership Down (1996) ; A later collection of short stories set in the same warren, published 24 years after the original novel.
Quick answers
- How many books are in Watership Down? Watership Down's Core Canon is 1 book, plus 1 more in the wider Library/Expanded material.
- Is Watership Down finished? Complete (1972).
- How much reading does Watership Down take? Low reading commitment (estimated from 1 Core Canon book · ~478 pages).
- How is Watership Down ranked? #245 in this site's official ranking, based on 474,284 reader ratings across 1 Core Canon book. See the full ranking for how this is calculated.
Why is it ranked #245?
Ranked #245 in the official ranking.
- Average reader rating of 4.08 across 1 core book.
- Backed by 474k reader ratings.
- 0.01 behind #244, The Engelsfors Trilogy.
- Below the top-10 average of 4.45.
Why explore this universe?
Well rated · 1 book · Complete · 474k ratings · Ranks #245 overall
Good choice if you want a quick, low-commitment mythic fantasy universe that's already finished, so there's no wait for the next book.
Reading order
A single Core Canon work: no sequencing question to resolve.
Awards (verified)
- No awards found for this universe.
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Official resources
Research details
Ranking metrics: weighted average 4.08 across 474,284 ratings on 1 Core Canon book. See Why is it ranked here? above for the full breakdown, or the full ranking.
How do we know this?
Admission: Watership Down admitted; Core Canon = the original 1972 novel accepted 2026-08-27
Sources: (see source tier definitions)
Last reviewed: 2026-08-27
Rule: Core Canon is the original 1972 novel. Expanded Canon is the 1996 short-story collection Tales from Watership Down, written a quarter-century later as supplementary folklore rather than a continuation of the main plot.