
Original title: Rakkauksien lokikirja
Author: Elina Hirvonen
Published: 2023
Publisher: WSOY
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 250
Reading material:
English sample and overview
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.
“From one of Finland’s most talented writers comes a beautiful, compelling and evocative novel about the universal power of love in its many diverse forms and voices, taking readers from Finland to Iraq, Malawi, Morocco, Spain, Zambia and points further afield.”
—Katja Pantzar, author of The Finnish Way, TarcherPerigee, Penguin Random House