Author Patricia Nicol reveals a selection of the best books on: Midsummer
- Patricia Nicol reveals a selection of her top picks of books on midsummer
- The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is semi-autobiographical novel set in Finland
- Cassandra Mortmain is teenage narrator in Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle
In the eastern Highlands of Scotland, over the May half-term week, I awoke around 4am to get a glass of water, and was struck by how light it was. Birds sang, insects buzzed, a bunny hopped across dewy grass.
My husband is no appreciator of an early reveille, otherwise I might have prodded him awake and suggested a pre-breakfast hike.
Instead I looked towards purple hills and savoured the pleasure of being the sole person awake in a house of slumber. I was the last to bed and noted how, even after 11pm, there was still some light in the sky.
Patricia Nicol reveals a selection of the best books on midsummer, including The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (pictured left) and I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith (pictured right)
In Scandinavia, they talk of midnight sun and white nights. I have always longed to experience midsummer there; in some countries it’s a public holiday. In its literature — from the capering of Moomins to the violence of Nordic noir — those summer nights are often the backdrop to festivities, and high drama.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, the Moomins’ creator, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a grandmother and granddaughter’s summers spent in a ramshackle island cabin in the Bay of Finland.
Midsummer’s Eve is prepared for with house-cleaning, wildflower-gathering and bonfire-building. ‘They turned the house into a green bower, inside and out . . . There would be herring, and pork and potatoes, and two kinds of vegetables. And marinated pears for dessert.’
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In the Swedish detective thriller, The Wolf And The Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag, Kristofer Blix arrives in Stockholm in the summer of 1793 to study medicine. Soon, however, he is distracted by drink and carousing. He falls into a life of crime, for which he is punished.
‘It is Midsummer Day — and as beautiful as its name,’ writes Cassandra Mortmain, the teenaged narrator of I Capture The Castle (by Dodie Smith), remembering how her midsummer eve’s ‘rites’, ended in a kiss.
She had been standing by her bonfire, garlanded in flowers, when American neighbour Simon arrived, unexpectedly, to take her sister Rose’s place in their rituals.
Whether you plan to mark midsummer or not, I hope you enjoy a magical summer’s evening.
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