A Winter Book

Published in 2006, five years after Tove Jansson’s death, A Winter Book is a collection of twenty short stories drawn from across her career (but mostly from the 1960s). The stories are of mixed quality, but generally feature the same themes of childhood, solitude, and nature that run through her novels. The two best stories are “The Squirrel” (in which a woman on a remote Finnish island develops a bond with a squirrel) and “Iceberg” (about a young girl’s surreal experience seeing an iceberg for the first time).