Through a series of vignettes, Tove Jansson evokes summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. Sophia—an earnest but tempestuous little girl—spends her summers with her grandmother and her father. Her mother is dead, and one of the first questions she puts to her grandmother is, “When are you going to die?” Grandmother is wise and wily and immensely patient, but equally wilful as her young charge. Sophia is as quick to anger as the summer storms and just as quick to see that anger dissipate. With her grandmother she struggles with friendship, love, and ever-present fear.

Sophia’s father is a silent presence working at his desk or gardening or placing the fishing nets, but he does not speak. The focus is entirely on Sophia and her grandmother.

I am fascinated by what Jansson is able to accomplish with her simple, concrete, but thoughtful prose. At one point the grandmother admonishes a visitor, “Stop talking in symbols…why do you use so many euphemisms and metaphors? Are you afraid?” Certainly Jansson is unafraid to face head on the anguish of loss and impending loss. She follows the solution that Sophia and her grandmother arrive at on many occasions, which is to invent stories that incorporate the people and events confronting them, rendering them manageable. “It was a particularly good evening to begin a book,” notes the narrator, and I think you will agree when you take up this one. Certainly recommended.

Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.

Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.

An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries where it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.

These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.

Tony Webster doesn’t get it, and he never will. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Veronica Ford, his one-time college sweetheart. It is an opinion that Tony, late in life, has come to share. But unbeknownst to Tony, and possibly to Veronica, there is no culpability associated with not getting it. And in some sense, here, ignorance is bliss.

Julian Barnes’ short novel has the feel of an extended short story. The opening section presents the nostalgic story that Tony likes to tell of his life, expansive in recounting his school friends and their various approaches to the driving forces of Eros and Thanatos (love and death), and the moral implications of action and intention; rather more compressed as the story moves into later life. Mingled with the early motifs and ceaselessly reiterated is the distinction between characters and events (i.e. story) on the one hand and the narratives we construct to convey same. Of the many formulations of history provided in the text, perhaps one left unstated might be “the narrative we construct of our past”. In the second, longer, part of the novel, Tony’s narrative of his past life undergoes severe and frequent transformation. As new facts come to light, whether as documentation or retrieved memories, Tony is forced to adjust his conception of himself and his friends, most especially Veronica, but also Adrian. Tony is constantly deciding what people and events are parts of his story, his narrative. And the sense of an ending, if there is one, is simply where the narrative stops being revised.

So much is compressed into this short novel that you may, like me, have longed for Julian Barnes to have been a bit more expansive. Tony is the only character revealed at length and he is, seemingly, an unreliable witness. But his very unreliableness is unreliable. For he is as reliable as his sources, never wilfully deceptive. One feels he would certainly “get it” if only some of the other characters were a bit more forthcoming. Like me, you may find the juvenile moral calculus employed by Adrian to be both implausible and impracticable. Moreover, muddling Camus and the analytical consequentialists is, I fear, just muddling. Nevertheless there is plenty here worthy of reflection. And certainly Barnes’ prose rarely puts a word wrong. One just rather wishes there were more of it. Recommended.

There is something succulent in the late novels of Barbara Pym, like deliberately over-ripened fruit, or a haunch of game hung for an extended period. One feels that Pym knows her characters almost too well, and that she may not particularly like them. Yet she spends time with them, and invites us to do the same: slightly distasteful women, ambiguous and calculating men, vapid gentlewomen, and the ever-charming clergyman (here occurring only as a brief fellow train traveller sharing a table for tea). So how does Pym take a character one doesn’t particularly like, such as Leonora Eyre, and in the space of a single short chapter render her entirely sympathetic, even pitiable? Only exquisite mastery of her craft could explain Pym’s remarkable affect upon her reader.

The elegant Leonora is ageing more or less gracefully. She enjoys the attentions of men, both older and younger, whilst knowing how to keep restrictive commitment at bay. She may always know the right word or gesture, but like Henry James’ prose, which is alluded to, she can come across as cold. Of course that suits some English men perfectly, especially those who would be somewhat overwhelmed by a real passionate relation with a woman. Sexual relations, which are subtext in the early Pym novels, are rendered explicit here. However, they remain curiously unreal, no doubt because they were never Pym’s object. And that raises the question, what really is Pym’s object in this novel? The answer lies in the reading, and I suspect will change as you read it again and again. As I will. Always recommended.

Turnabout is fair play. In Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a precise and delicate series of dramatic scenes are presented that paint the relationship between Mari and Jonna, lifelong friends, artistic colleagues, travelling companions. They tolerate each other’s minor manias, accommodate their idiosyncrasies, make blunders and rectify them, and contribute to each other’s art – writing (primarily) in the case of Mari, visual art in the case of Jonna. But most of all they remain open to the almost priceless small acts of kindness that are possible when love, respect, and friendship are the deep foundation of a relationship.

Such spare descriptive writing seemingly insists on transmuting into symbolism. For example, Mari and Jonna share a well-weathered boat named Viktoria, and fathers that were each named Viktor. But even here, Jansson refuses to accept mere symbolism opting instead for the transformative effects of nostalgia. In like fashion, their experience of the American west in the segment set in Phoenix follows hard on the heels of a discussion of the B-movie western. You might be thinking Baudrillard, but don’t. As the hostess of the Phoenix bar says, “Give these ladies some space…They’re from Finland.” That sounds like good advice. Recommended.