Six books by writers from Finland, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with The Year of the Hare and The Unknown Soldier.
Finland's national epic, the Kalevala, was drawn from oral folk poetry and first published in 1835. The country has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, and its founding novel, Seven Brothers by Aleksis Kivi, appeared in 1870 in Finnish, telling of rowdy brothers who settle a backwoods farm and learn to read. Frans Eemil Sillanpää won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1939. The Civil War of 1918 and the wars with the Soviet Union run through much twentieth-century fiction.
Väinö Linna's The Unknown Soldier tells of a machine-gun platoon of ordinary conscripts in the Continuation War. Arto Paasilinna's The Year of the Hare sends a journalist and an injured hare wandering the Finnish countryside in a dry-humoured comic road tale. Kati Hiekkapelto's The Hummingbird, a crime novel set in northern Finland, features a police investigator with a refugee background.
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A journalist abandons Helsinki life with an injured hare and wanders the Finnish countryside and forests in a comic, dry-humoured road tale.
Follows a machine-gun platoon of ordinary Finnish conscripts through the Continuation War against the Soviet Union, a foundational story of national memory.
Follows a tenant-farming family from the late 19th century through the Civil War, showing rural class divisions and national history.
The 1870 founding novel of Finnish literature, about rowdy brothers who settle a backwoods farm and learn to read.
A black-comedy thriller set in a small northern Finnish town, where a mushroom exporter investigates his own poisoning.
A crime novel set in northern Finland, where a police investigator with a refugee background faces rural life and questions of immigration.
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