Notes from an Island

By: Tove Jansson, Alexander Chee - introduction

Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy

From a renowned artist and writer, a deeply personal nature journal that includes sketches from her romantic partner, artist Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin. Tove's signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti's subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character. Notes from an Island is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson’s journal, with Tooti’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin.

Includes a companion PDF of images from the print edition.

Critic reviews

If you never see me again in life after this book is published, it is because I left to find an island of my own at last.—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel