The Year of the Hare

The international bestseller. A novel of one man’s existential journey away from his life and in to the wild. With a hare.

Vatanen is a journalist in Finland. The car he is riding in accidentally hits a young wild hare. The injured animal scampers off and the car moves on—without Vatanen. He has disembarked to find the hare and nurse it back to health. With the hare in his arms, Vatanen starts walking. Travelling through forests and seasons, he finds himself on a journey of comic adventures and near misses.

Embracing this life, Vatanen decides to quit his job, leave his wife, sell his possessions and spend a year in the wild. As the hare slowly heals, so too does Vatanen. This is a picaresque tale of finding happiness where there was anger, simplicity where there was complexity, and meaning where there was none.

It is a book in the wonderful tradition of Watership Down and Life of Pi. It is a story you will return to again and again. It is a story of a man and a wild hare.

Extract

The journalist sat on the edge of the ditch, holding the hare in his lap, like an old woman with her knitting on her knees, lost in thought. The sound of the car engine faded away. The sun set.

The journalist put down the hare on the grass. For a moment he was afraid it would try to escape; but it huddled in the grass, and when he picked it up again, it showed no sign of fear at all. “So here we are,” he said to the hare. “Left.”

That was the situation: he was sitting alone in the forest, in his jacket, on a summer evening. No disputing it—he’d been abandoned.

What does one usually do in such a situation? Perhaps he should have responded to the photographer’s shouts, he thought. Now maybe he ought to find his way back to the road, wait for the next car, hitch a ride, and think about getting to Heinola, or Helsinki, under his own steam. The idea was immensely unappealing. The journalist looked in his briefcase. There were a few banknotes, his press card, his health insurance card, a photograph of his wife, a few coins, a couple of condoms, a bunch of keys, an old May Day celebration badge.

And also some pens, a notepad, a ring. The management had printed on the pad Kaarlo Vatanen, journalist. His health insurance card indicated that Kaarlo Vatanen had been born in 1942.

Vatanen got to his feet, gazed at the sunset’s last redness through the trees, nodded to the hare. He looked toward the road but made no move that way. He picked up the hare off the grass, put it tenderly in the side pocket of his jacket, and left the clearing for the darkening forest.

Praise for The Year of the Hare:

‘The world is full of books about midlife crises but few of them are as good as this and I think we have the hare to thank for it. A midlife crisis is better with a hare, because animals teach us how to live.’

Alan Saunders

‘Rarely do reviewers come upon a novel they believe to be a masterpiece. This is such a work.’

Independent

‘A moral compass that points firmly north and out of doors, away from cities.’

Los Angeles Times

‘A fable of the joys of freedom.’

Boston Globe

‘An enjoyably quirky fable and a warm vindication of eccentricity. Paasilinna writes with effortless simplicity and rude insight and it’s impossible to keep a straight face at some Scandinavian misery-mongering. The novel, which was first published in 1975, stands the test of time rather well.’

Pick of the Week, Saturday Age

‘This picaresque tale is really a hymn to freedom…it is also a hymn to nature, which is the only ‘character’ to emerge from the saga with its integrity intact…In this year of sporting extravaganzas, environmental disasters, political grandstanding and economic meltdown, Paasilinna’s gem comes as a welcome antidote to all of the above. It firmly points the way back to a rediscovery of sylvian simplicity and away from the complexity and constraints of urban life, resetting our moral compass.’

Sunday Star Times (NZ)

‘A man’s search for a more meaningful life but without pomposity and with much self-mockery towards our many foibles…Perfect for the bus trip to work.’

Weekend Press NZ

‘If only midlife crises were this interesting in real life, though perhaps in Finland they are….[Journalist Vatanen] embarks on a series of picaresque adventures with an escapist fantasy ending that reminded me of a classic Australian short story, The Jumping Jeweller of Lavender Bay. Combined with the simple, solemn Scandinavian style, the snowy landscape and the charismatic hare, this magical ending gives this story the aura of a timeless fairytale.’

Sydney Morning Herald