A delightfully witty and mordant modern classic from Finland: the story of a journalist who befriends an injured hare and embarks into the Finnish wilderness __________ 'No wonder the French have made this book into a cult. Finnish wit as sharp as the Arctic weather' Mail on Sunday 'A change-your-life novel' New York Magazine 'Sums up the Finnish culture and people' Guardian __________ Kaarlo Vatanen is fed up with his life. He's sick of his job, his wife, his urban lifestyle in Helsinki. But all this changes one warm summer's evening, when he encounters an injured hare on a deserted country road. On an impulse he can't fully explain, Vatanen abruptly abandons his car, his home, his wife and his job to chase the hare into the forest. A year of comic misadventures ensues, where Vatanen and his unlikely companion battle through forest fires, pagan sacrifices, military war games and encounters with murderous bears, kept afloat by the help and understanding of other sympathetic free spirits. A much-loved classic in Finland, The Year of the Hare is a freewheeling adventure through the Finnish countryside, and a witty portrayal of one man's long detour from conventional living.

When the United States government engineered the overthrow of the troublesome South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, it set in motion a tumultuous course of events deepening the Vietnam War. The Year of the Hare asks why President John F. Kennedy decided to depose his ally of nine years, despite almost daily warnings from some cabinet officials that the most likely consequence of a coup would be chaos. Why did Kennedy and his colleagues choose this perilous course in the midst of an uncertain civil war? To answer this question, The Year of the Hare takes us inside the Kennedy administration, where the State Department largely supported the coup while the Pentagon and the CIA consistently resisted it. Francis X. Winters’s research is based on in-depth interviews with high-ranking members of the Kennedy administration, including Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball, along with the newly issued multivolume compilation Foreign Relations and the United States, 1961-1964, Vietnam and the recently opened General Records of the U.S. State Department for 1963. The reasons for American support of the coup in Vietnam, Winters asserts, lie both in the ethos of the era, with its dynamic confidence in the superiority of American ideals, and in Kennedy’s political aspirations. The Year of the Hare explores the synergy between the idealism and personal ambition that were at the root of the war that haunts us still.

* 2021 Vermont Book Award, Winner. * 2021 New England Book Awards, Finalist. * A3C Reads: March 2023 Book of the Month. "A Most Anticipated Book of 2021" —Elle, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Vulture The Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, of her resilience and personal transformation under the pin of the male gaze. Raised to be obedient by a stern grandmother in a blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum, she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that “polo” refers only to ponies, teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells of exotic escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson. Soon, Rosie is living with him on a swanky estate on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, naively in sway to his moral ambivalence. A daughter—Miranda—is born, just as his current con goes awry forcing them to abscond in the middle of the night to the untamed wilderness of northern Vermont. Almost immediately, Bennett abandons them in an uninsulated cabin without a car or cash for weeks at a time, so he can tend a teaching job that may or may not exist at an elite college. Rosie is forced to care for her young daughter alone, and to tackle the stubborn intricacies of the wood stove, snowshoe into town, hunt for wild game, and forage in the forest. As Rosie and Miranda’s life gradually begins to normalize, Bennett’s schemes turn malevolent, and Rosie must at last confront his twisted deceptions. Her actions have far-reaching and perilous consequences. An astounding new literary thriller from a celebrated author at the height of her storytelling prowess, The Hare bravely considers a woman’s inherent sense of obligation—sexual and emotional—to the male hierarchy, and deserves to be part of our conversation as we reckon with #MeToo and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Rosie Monroe emerges as an authentic, tarnished feminist heroine.

The hare permeates our consciousness like no other creature. Despite facing ever increasing environmental pressures, the hare still retains its ability to both delight and confound in equal measure. Produced in conjunction with The Hare Preservation Trust, this book offers a unique insight into this most fascinating of creatures.

From the author of Chatterton and Shakespeare: A Biography comes a gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous 19th-century Shakespeare forgery. Charles and Mary Lamb, who will in time achieve lasting fame as the authors of Tales from Shakespeare for Children, are still living at home, caring for their dotty and maddening parents. Reading Shakespeare is the siblings’ favorite reprieve, and they are delighted when an ambitious young bookseller comes into their lives claiming to possess a ‘lost’ Shakespearea play. Soon all of London is eagerly anticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the play not knowing that they have all been duped by charlatan and a fraud.

WINNER OF THE 2022 FOREWORD INDIES SILVER BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD IN HISTORICAL FICTION On a remote Gaelic farmstead in medieval Ireland, word reaches Alberic of conquering Norman knights arriving from England. Oppressed by the social order that enslaved his Norman father, he yearns for the reckoning he believes the invaders will bring—but his world is about to burn. Captured by the Norman knight Hugo de Lacy and installed at Dublin Castle as a translator, Alberic’s confused loyalties are tested at every turn. When de Lacy marches inland, Alberic is set on a collision course with his former masters amidst rumours of a great Gaelic army rising in the west. Can Alberic navigate safely through revenge, lust and betrayal to find his place amidst the birth of a kingdom in a land of war?

One family's quest to survive the devastation of the Khmer Rouge Year of the Rabbit tells the true story of one family’s desperate struggle to survive the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Immediately after declaring victory in the war, they set about evacuating the country’s major cities with the brutal ruthlessness and disregard for humanity that characterized the regime ultimately responsible for the deaths of one million citizens. Cartoonist Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Khmer Rouge takeover, as his family set forth on the chaotic mass exodus from Phnom Penh. Year of the Rabbit is based on firsthand accounts, all told from the perspective of his parents and other close relatives. Stripped of any money or material possessions, Veasna’s family found themselves exiled to the barren countryside along with thousands of others, where food was scarce and brutal violence a constant threat. Year of the Rabbit shows the reality of life in the work camps, where Veasna’s family bartered for goods, where children were instructed to spy on their parents, and where reading was proof positive of being a class traitor. Constantly on the edge of annihilation, they realized there was only one choice—they had to escape Cambodia and become refugees. Veasna has created a harrowing, deeply personal account of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.