What’s love all about?

In her unique Finnish voice, award-winning author Elina Hirvonen has written a heartfelt and unforgettable novel about everything we love. In The Logbook of Love, conversations about love form a sea of connections among people from different backgrounds and places.

The narrator meets with friends and strangers, moves between the past and the present, shifts from country to country. Everywhere she goes, she talks with others about love: romantic love, the love for justice and human rights, marital love, the love of parents for children, the love that can bind friends from different cultures and backgrounds – and the love that, no matter how powerful it is, sometimes fails to bridge the gaps between people.

The individuals she encounters, and the love stories they tell, leave their mark on the narrator. Her reflections on what she has heard and experienced portray a world that’s heating up too quickly as it slips into conflict and violence, but where everyone still continues to search for meaning, hope and joy.

As a small boy grows up in Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein, fear is always present. His father is part of an underground opposition movement that tries to overthrow the dictator. The father ends up spending years in prison, and the boy learns that just one wrong word can put his life in danger.
The family escapes to melancholy Finland, a country recovering from financial depression. It is a safe country, but the boy grows up with mixed feelings: can one be a good Muslim and a good Finnish boy? When ISIS in rising in Iraq, the boy returns to his home country as a peace negotiator, hoping to build a county where his children can travel safely to one day.