7.2 /10 1 Votes
Original title Jäniksen vuosi Language Finnish Publication date 1975 Originally published 1975 Page count 182 | 3.6/5 Goodreads Country Finland Publisher Weilin+Göös Published in English March 1995 Translator Herbert Lomas | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Adaptations The Year of the Hare (1977) Genres Comedy, Satire, Speculative fiction, Picaresque Fiction Similar Arto Paasilinna books, Speculative fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Year of the Hare (Finnish: Jäniksen vuosi) is a 1975 novel by Finnish author Arto Paasilinna. It tells the story of Kaarlo Vatanen, a frustrated journalist, who, after nearly killing a hare with his car, decides to live with the hare in the wilderness.
The novel has been translated into over a dozen languages including English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Slovenian and Estonian. It is Paasilinna's most widely read work and was included in 1994 in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works which funded the 1995 English translation by Herbert Lomas. It was adapted twice into feature films: a Finnish 1977 film called The Year of the Hare, and a 2006 French film directed by Marc Rivière called Le Lièvre de Vatanen.