Watership Down (by Richard Adams)

When Hazel's clairvoyant brother, Fiver, predicts a catastrophe, Hazel gathers other young rabbits willing to flee to establish a new warren of their own. But few of them have been far from home, and their journey is perilous: They're attacked by rats in a barn, must cross a creek, and are lulled into a false sense of security in a warren whose rabbits turn out to be fed--and harvested--by a farmer.

With every incident, however, the value of each individual becomes clear to the others, and they coalesce into a unified band. When they at last reach their objective, a desolate hill called Watership Down, they feel they have found, and earned, a home.

But then their search for mates to help populate their warren leads to an encounter with a repressive rabbit society, and a gripping undercover plot that culminates in a harrowing stand against the ferocious dictator, General Woundwort.

This is primarily an adventure novel, but one for thinking people. Readers are expected to engage their brains, even for the suspenseful action sequences. Social allegory pops up regularly, from the restlessness of the warren's disenfranchised younger bucks to the fatalism and repression in two other rabbit communities, whose members have given up freedom for an illusion of security. Author Richard Adams also conveys a palpable love of nature. He knows the story's countryside setting intimately, and much of his narrative contains descriptions of the landscape and references to specific plant species.