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.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel | Laos | Turkmenistan | Kyrgyzstan | Hong Kong | Singapore | Lebanon | Palestine | Oman
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Chile | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba | Nicaragua | Paraguay | El Salvador
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo | Sierra Leone | Libya | Liberia
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria | Switzerland | Belarus | Bulgaria | Serbia | Denmark | Norway | Finland
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea