I’ll learn to be calm, he thought. I’ll learn. 

The Gulls
Tove Jansson

In 12 stories, Tove Jansson tackles the themes of traveling and human encounters, phenomena that carry both freedom and captivity.

A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish island is thrown into disarray by an oddly intrusive child; an artist returns from abroad to discover that her past has been eerily usurped.

With the deceptively light prose that is her hallmark, Tove Jansson reveals to us the precariousness of a journey – the unease we feel at being placed outside of our millieu, the restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.

The collection contains these short stories:

An Eightieth Birthday
The Summer Child
A Foreign City
The Woman Who Borrowed Memories
Travelling Light
The Garden of Eden
Shopping
The Forest
The PE Teacher’s Death
The Gulls
The Hothouse
Correspondence

Travelling Light on the publisher Sort of Books’ website.

The book was first published in Swedish as Resa med lätt bagage in 1987 and was translated into English in 2010.