Notes from an island

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunstrm, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietil, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the shifting seascapes and the island’s austere rocky charms. Notes from an Island, written in 1996, is both a chronicle of this period and a paean to the mature love that Tove and ‘Tuuti’ shared for their island and for each other. Tove’s spare prose, and Tuulikki’s subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative and plangent beauty.