Där jag har min hjärtans kär review

At this point in World War II, Finland is allied with Germany in the Continuation War and German soldiers are flooding in through Hanko on their way to the Russian front. In the canteen, in between trying to create edible meals from limited root vegetables, Clara cheerfully works her way through a succession of German boyfriends in return for chocolate while the more innocent Lissi falls pregnant to a German officer at a dance.

As the spring of 1942 goes on, more of Hanko’s residents are desperate to return. Aino, engaged to Berndt, eagerly leaves her parents’ farm when she is re-hired as a reporter for the local paper. Little Nisse, Berndt’s son, has been sent back to Finland by his foster parents in Sweden and has remained mute while living with Aino ever since. Aino reunites him with his grandparents Hjalmar and Sara and they too move back, finding lodgings before starting to rebuild their bombed house. Disa, the manageress of a Hanko hotel in the first book of the trilogy, returns to live in the old customs officer’s house with her lover, the smuggler Hugo Bergström, and finds work in the army canteen too.

Aino’s job as a reporter enables her, the local paper’s evacuated readers and us to see the restoration work first hand, including the rebuilding of Hanko’s landmark red water tower. Like Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, the book is the story of a place and the people whose lives revolve around it. Hanko is a character itself, with its water tower, its harbour and its biscuit factory, and like its people, it has suffered from the ravages of war. But the war is not yet over and the relief of the characters in returning is tempered by their fear for family members awaiting call-up or sent to the front. 

The book begins with a two-page summary introducing the characters but this does not provide quite enough information for anyone beginning the trilogy with book three, as I did. Fair enough; it’s a daft place to start. It was a gripping read and the writing makes it clear that all the characters have changed, as the town has, but I would recommend starting with Snart har sommaren blommat ut (The Summer Now Is Ending) and following their lives and the closely intertwined fate of their beloved town from May 1939. 

Through the stories of Aino and Berndt’s relationship, the heartwarming recovery of young Nisse under the reassuring eye of his grandfather Hjalmar, the birth of Lissi’s baby and the return of the wounded Holger, Karin Collins shows the physical and psychological damage caused by war amidst the hope of return and reconstruction. It would be of interest to anyone who loves family sagas set in the past with a great sense of place, and the true historic setting would enable international audiences who may be unfamiliar with Finland’s situation in the Second World War to learn more.