May 21, 2024
310 PAGES | ISBN 978-1-989496-88-6
**Silver Medal Winner for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Award for Science Fiction**
**Longlisted for the 2025 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic**
A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a space-going whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a re-creation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanities quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.
Advance Praise
“Expansive, imaginative and thrumming with volatile life, The Year Shall Run Like Rabbits is a showcase for Ghan’s immersive and elegant prose to depict worlds beyond our own. Toronto will never be the same.” – Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold
“Sentient holograms, cyborgs, moon colonies, a dreary future-Toronto – Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits reads like a mythical, cyberpunk, posthuman fever dream. This novel is for fans of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Omar El Akkad’s American War.” – John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of My Volcano and Bad Houses
“Cinematic, poetic and overflowing with invention, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a marvel – a heartfelt exploration of what it means to be alive, and a love story eons and galaxies in scale. I am in awe of Ben Ghan’s imagination.” – Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Reviews
Review of Ben Berman Ghan’s “The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits” (Samantha Purchase, Freefall Magazine, 17/11/2024)
"Where Ghan could wallow in misery or doom, he deftly injects compassion, a grace, that flows throughout the novel."
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits – Ben Berman Ghan (Libby O'Neil, Full Stop, 24/07/2024)
"I’ve found myself returning to it again and again, flipping through the pages in search of new details, rereading passages that once mystified me. It is a novel that rewards a second read with a much deeper appreciation of its complexity."
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits by Ben Berman Ghan (Laurie Burns, Miramichi Reader, 22/05/2024)
"This book reads like a technicolour acid trip, confusion and chaos in the best way, difficulty finding your footing, excited to see what is next. It also has incredibly poetic prose and big, imaginative ideas and could be called a genre-defying piece of work, horror and sci-fi, literary, and dystopian. This is a great read for anyone who finds themselves constantly asking, “where is this world going?” and feeling worried about it."
Locus Looks at Books: Jake Casella Brookins (Jake Casella Brookins, Locus magazine, May 2024)
"Shot through with love stories, anger at authoritarian cruelty, and surreal and striking visions, it’s an elegiac and ruminative novel – a strange but moving meditation on death and change and what comes after."
Interviews
E411 with Ben Berman Ghan (Jamie Tennant, Get Lit, 02/10/2024)
A fun interview with author Ben German Ghan, talking about his wildly inventive spec fic novel (if we have to classify it).
Lunar Forests, Interplanetary War, and Cyberpunk Heroes Are Just the Beginning in Ben Berman Ghan's Debut Novel (Open Book, 17/06/2024)
"Death is not the end."
Articles
A Fire That Knows Both Our Names: A Conversation with Jeff VanderMeer (Ben Berman Ghan, The Ex-Puritan, Winter 2025)
A great interview between Benjamin Berman Ghan and Jeff VanderMeer
Toronto on the Page (Ben Berman Ghan, Wolsak & Wynn blog, 04/02/2025)
Ben shares a list of books that reimagine Toronto.
The All Lit Up Holiday Reading Edit (All Lit Up, 22/11/2024)
It's lovely to see Benjamin Berman Ghan's The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits on this holiday round up.
5 Speculative and Science Fiction Novels to Lose Your Body In (Ben Berman Ghan, BookTrib., 22/08/2024)
Ben offers a list of "5 Speculative and Science Fiction Novels to Lose Your Body In."
Excerpted: The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits by Ben Berman Ghan (All Lit Up, 27/06/2024)
Ben shares an excerpt from his novel.
What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Spring 2024 (Hamilton Review of Books, 05/04/2024)
It's wonderful to see Benjamin Berman Ghan on this great list.
Excerpt: The Years Shall Run like Rabbits by Ben Berman Ghan (Wolsak & Wynn) (Civilian Reader, 04/04/2024)
Ben shares an excerpt from The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits.
Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Spring Fiction Preview (49th Shelf, 06/02/2024)
It's wonderful to see Ben's book on the 49th Shelf Spring Fiction preview!
Excerpt
Click here to read an excerpt from The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits.
About the Author
Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada, whose prose and poetry have been published in
Clarkesworld magazine,
Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the
/tƐmz/ Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection
What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary. You can find him at
www.inkstainedwreck.ca.
