Arto Paasilinna is one of Finland's most translated authors and `The Year of the Hare` is his most popular novella, first published in 1975. It is a sort of return to nature story and a rejection of civilization - obviously Rousseauian in sentiment, the book is very popular among the French, and Romantics everywhere. The hare is the wild heart in us all - injured by a car, the main character nurses it back to health and then takes to the woods where he finds an ongoing struggle between taming the wilderness versus going feral, one often leading to the other. It's cute, often funny, and has a geographic path that can be followed on a map that helps one to learn more about Finlands more obscure locations in the north. Apparently many of the characters who cross the pages of this "picaresque novel with an ecological theme" are stereotypical Finnish. In the end Paasilinna saves the hare but kills the bear (and the crow and the forest etc..), it is cynical, it is Finnish.