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The Mare
  • Published: 27 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405989558
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Mare

Formats & editions
EBook
27 Aug 2026
Audiobook
27 Aug 2026
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Based on a true story, a masterful and haunting Holocaust novel about how an ordinary person becomes a monster - and what happens in the aftermath

Before the Second World War broke out, Hermine Braunsteiner was an ordinary young woman, a teenage housemaid from Vienna. By the time the war ended, she had transformed into one of the most notoriously cruel and violent guards in the Nazi concentration camps, the ‘Stamping Mare’ known for kicking prisoners to death.

In the aftermath of WWII, she disappeared back into civilian life, her crimes largely unknown and unpunished. Then she met a US war veteran, a bachelor holidaying alone in Austria. Ignorant of her past, 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 the couple's door…

The Mare offers a gripping portrait of the descent of ordinary people into absolute inhumanity. Unflinching and charged with urgent relevance, it asks how we attempt to justify the unjustifiable – and forgive the unforgivable.
  • Published: 27 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405989558
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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About the author

Angharad Hampshire

Angharad Hampshire was born in Manchester in 1972. She has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service in London, an honorary lecturer in journalism at the University of Hong Kong and a regular contributor to the South China Morning Post. She has a Doctor of Arts in creative writing from the University of Sydney. Angharad is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University and lives in York with her family. The Mare is her first novel.
AH

Praise for The Mare

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 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'

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'

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’