The best known books set in each country: Finland

Posted on 11 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Finland is in Northern Europe, with Russia to its east, Norway to its north and Sweden to its west, and the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland to the south and west. It has been independent since 1917, having been historically ruled by Sweden until after the Napoleonic Wars when it was ruled by Russia, with considerable autonomy.

I have had the honour of knowing two Finnish presidents personally, the late Martti Ahtisaari, who served from 1994 to 2000, and Alexander Stubb, the incumbent. When I worked for the International Crisis Group, Martti Ahtisaari was the Chair of the Board. The interns in the Crisis Group office had a game called ‘Niue’, where the winner is the first to identify all ten countries which are members of the United Nations and whose common name in English has exactly four letters. (I won’t give away the answers here, you can work it out for yourself.) I tried this out on Ahtisaari once over dinner. He is the only person I have known who was able to simply list them off after a couple of seconds’ thought, perhaps mentally going around the desks in the UN General Assembly.

I was also the administrator of the Hugo Awards for Worldcon 75, the first (and so far only) Worldcon to be held in Finland, as written up here and here. So it’s a country I feel very close to, though I have not been since 2018.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Finland.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Summer Book	Tove Jansson	68,051	3,877	14,796
Comet in Moominland	Tove Jansson	24,563	2,389	4,996
Finn Family Moomintroll	Tove Jansson	20,126	2,948	4,013
Moominland Midwinter	Tove Jansson	18,555	2,026	3,823
The Moomins and the Great Flood	Tove Jansson	23,147	992	4,795
The Year of the Hare	Arto Paasilinna	19,624	1,819	2,575
Moominsummer Madness	Tove Jansson	15,128	1,753	2,961
Moominpappa at Sea	Tove Jansson	12,850	1,586	2,318

Well. We haven’t had a table as one-sided as this since Kyrgyzstan. Tove Jansson is best known for her books for younger readers about the Moomins, a tribe of slightly hippopotamus-like creatures who have gentle, yet sometimes dark, adventures around the islands, coast and interior of Finland. When I last did this exercise in 2015, two different Moomin books won on Goodreads and LibraryThing. But it’s interesting that The Summer Book, a more profound and reflective work for adults (still very short) has now overtaken the Moomins to win on all three systems.

It is timely to give a boost to the newly established Quentin Blake Centre in London, which has just announced that it is hosting an exhibition of Tove Jansson’s art starting on 27 November 2026 and on until 9 May 2027. I definitely need to see it.

Meanwhile if you want to see Tove Jansson herself as a young woman, you’ll find her in the park just east of the railway station in Helsinki, as sculpted by her father, Viktor Jansson. (He did two other statues of her which are also in the city centre, but this is the easiest of them to find.)

The other Finnish book that made this week’s list, The Year of the Hare, is a 1975 novel that was adapted into a 1977 film, which I remember watching on TV one evening in 1981.

Including the StoryGraph numbers made no difference to the top eight. I disqualified three books. A substantial chunk of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murasami, is set in Finland, but it is less than half of the book. The Egyptian, by Mika Watari, and Purge, by Sofi Oksanen, are set in Egypt and Estonia respectively, but their authors are Finnish which I guess means that people tag them with the ‘finland’ tag.

Other books that I have reviewed here by Tove Jansson: Tales from Moominvalley, Moominvalley in November, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, A Winter Book, Sculptor’s Daughter, Travelling Light, Letters from Klara, The Listener. See also Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen.

Other books that I have reviewed here which concern Finland: Jean Sibelius, by Guy Rickards; The Ahtisaari Legacy: Resolve and Negotiate, eds. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen; The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian Aldiss; The Story of Kullervo, by J.R.R. Tolkien; Not Before Sundown, by Johanna Sinisalo; Giants at the End of the World: A Showcase of Finnish Weird, eds. Johanna Sinisalo and Toni Jerrman; lthe fourth section of The Compleat Enchanter, by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt; and Meidän piti lähteä, by Sanna Pelliccioni.

If I have counted correctly, this is the eighth country where seven out of eight books are by women, after Jordan, Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

Coming next: Mauritania, Slovakia, Ireland and New Zealand.

Go Alex!!

Posted on 29 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

The initial results are in, and it looks very much as if Alexander Stubb will be elected the next President of Finland in the second round of voting in two weeks’ time.

I’ve known him since he was a member of the European Parliament, and for complex reasons ended up hosting an official meeting for him and the Turkish Cypriot leadership in my office in December 2008. Back in 2018 I went to Helsinki to help him campaign for the EPP nomination for the Presidency of the European Comission.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1060104115039227904

Finland’s biggest newspaper ran a story not so much about him but about me being there:

More recently I have taken cooking advice from him:

Breakfast advice from Alexander Stubb

This evening’s results indicate that he will face off against the Green candidate Pekka Haavisto, who lost the two previous elections in 2018 and 2012. I don’t have any problem with Haavisto, and the really good news is that the extremist candidate finished a poor third, but I’ll be cheering for Alex on 11 February.

The Ahtisaari Legacy: Resolve and Negotiate, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen

Posted on 13 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (“The Right to be Buried”, by Helena Ranta):

When we boarded the plane again, there were only four Finns left. The plane flew low and the devastation of the war could be seen clearly as we approached Sarajevo Airport.

This is a lovely collection of eleven short papers by Finns involved with peace-making in the Balkans, pulled together to commemorate the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari in 2008. I myself worked with Ahtisaari quite a lot in the 2002-2008 period, and the collection was given to me by co-editor Nina Suomalainen. He is ill now, but I am sure that he appreciated this collection at the time.

These are all very good papers. Contributors include Ahtisaari himself, three others who I know personally (Olli Rehn, Alpo Rusi and Kai Sauer), and also Elisabeth Rehn – who was defeated by Ahtisaari in the 1994 presidential election – and the late Harri Holkeri, who I knew by sight from both the Northern Ireland peace talks, where he was one of George Mitchell’s co-chairs, and his stint as head of the UN in Kosovo.

The Finns have a reputation for being somewhat silent (the joke is that you can tell an extrovert Finn, because they look at your shoes), but these are all eloquent accounts of personal experience in a region where the Finns felt needed and useful. Most of the details are about Kosovo at its different stages, with both Ahtisaari and Sauer giving their accounts of the diplomatic process that led to independence, and Holkeri trying to give his own side of the story to explain his disastrous tenure. (Ahtisaari pushed for his appointment, which was surely a mistake.)

But I learned most from two people I had not heard of; Arto Räty gives an account of what it is like to be a peacekeeper in a NATO mission at a time when Finland’s relationship with NATO was less comfortable than it is now, and Terhi Nieminen-Mäkynen tells us about being the unelected, UN-appointed mayor of the southern Kosovo town of Prizren.

The other thing I learned – though of course the authors are a self-selected and not necessarily representative sample – is that Finns feel quite strongly about the Balkans. Their own nation emerged from conflict and spent most of the twentieth century uneasily balance between two blocs; older Finns can recall when they and Tito’s Yugoslavia were the lynchpins of the Non-Aligned Movement, and Helsinki hosted the signing of the Final Act which laid the groundwork for the peaceful ending of the Cold War fifteen years later.

I should note that Finns feel equally strongly, if not more so, about Ukraine, having themselves emerged from a century of Russian dominance. The current war has pushed them directly to join NATO. It did not always look inevitable. I remember a lunch in Kyiv in 2005 where I was sitting between Martti Ahtisaari and Thorvald Stoltenberg, the former Norwegian foreign minister. Stoltenberg leaned across me to say, “Martti! Congratulations! I hear that you have tripled the support for NATO membership in Finland!” Ahtisaari replied, “Yes! From 5% to 15%!” That was then, this is now, and Stoltenberg’s son is now the NATO Secretary-General.

Unfortunately this book is out of print and there seem to be no second-hand copies available, so I can’t supply my usual “get it here” link, and I am all the more grateful to Nina for giving it to me in 2016. I’m ashamed to say however that this was the non-fiction book which had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2 by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams.

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The best known books set in each country: Finland

Go Alex!!

The Ahtisaari Legacy: Resolve and Negotiate, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen