The Year of the Hare

"[A] wonderful book . . . If you are too timid to actually cut all the ties to your 'civilized' life, but still have a yearning to get away from clocks and calendars, Arto Paasilinna's The Year of the Hare provides the perfect escape literature. . . . The humor in this book just sneaks up on you. . . . [It] will have you laughing and gasping by turns. . . . The writing is as spare and clean as the lines of Scandinavian design. . . . Of the many lines in this book that I cherished, the last is one of the most delicious: 'Vatanen is a man to be reckoned with.' So is this book." --Lonely Planet

"A fable of the joys of freedom . . . The hare proves to be a delightful, undemanding, and loyal companion, who can laugh, listen, and feel embarrassment." --The Boston Globe

"Paasilinna's style is all Finn--a sly sense of humor, a simplicity, a moral compass that points firmly north and out of doors, away from cities. . . . Readers root for Vatanen as he leaps off the mad merry-go-round." --Los Angeles Times

"Compelling . . . You might just find yourself wishing for a hare to enter your life in the near future." --Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Beguiling, gently ironic . . . [an] ode to spontaneity and serendipity." --National Geographic Traveler

"[A] joy . . . The glory of the outdoors is celebrated here, through each season, and we can nearly smell the early clover and meadow vetchling of the hare's diet. . . . Vatanen is who we want to be [and] who we yearn to be brave enough to become, as soon as we stop waiting for the timing to be right." --BookPage

"Hilarious . . . With its fiercely independent protagonist and its depiction of Finland's wild northland, this comic novel will offer readers a rare opportunity to experience Finland and read one of that country's most popular authors." --Library Journal

"The Year of the Hare offers enjoyable yarns: fun adventures, agreeably related. . . . It's so good-natured and has so much varied action--and that animal-appeal--that it makes for a consistently enjoyable read." --The Complete Review

"Exhilarating . . . The sheer literary delight of Arto Paasilinna's comic novels is one of the best-kept secrets in Finland. . . . You'll want to laugh out loud at all the good parts, and savor every lean, simple, honest sentence." --Shelf Awareness

"The Year of the Hare is only the most Finnish, and perhaps most antically Zen-ish, of a shelf-load of books that tell us to find and live by our own ideas of contentment." --The Wall Street Journal

"An exemplary comic novel, full of amiable if binding warnings about the septic follies of civilization--to be read with rising anxiety and delight." --Thomas McGuane, author of The Longest Silence

"Step out of the domestic gulag and into The Year of the Hare, a novel that depicts the confident freedom of the journeyman. I loved it." --Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

"I love The Year of the Hare. . . . Which of us wouldn't secretly want to live in a novel as fresh and as full of events as this one?" --Pico Iyer, from the Foreword

"Paasilinna has been amusing Finns for thirty years and readers in twenty-five languages." --The New York Times