Cambridge Book Club, June 2023 - Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson

We will be meeting as usual on the last Thursday of every month - this month we will be meeting at 7pm at The Alex on Gwydir Street on the 29th June.

A table for the Book Club is booked under the name 'Mary'.

There is limited space and we don't want to overwhelm the venue, so we have limited the number of attendees.
The pub is very accommodating and will try to provide more seats if needed, but if you find you cannot attend for any reason please change your attendance in the group so others can take your place.

Street parking is free after 6.30pm. There is also a multistory nearby, the Grafton East Car Park.

The book for June is 'Sculptor's Daughter: A Childhood Memoir' by Tove Jansson, kindly suggested by Anna.

At each meeting, everyone who attends may nominate a book for the following month. The book is decided by a dice roll. Ideally, we will limit the length to approximately 400 pages so that people will be able to finish reading before the next meeting. If for whatever reason you can't finish or don't want to finish, that's totally fine. Just come along anyway and discuss what you liked and disliked.

A book by Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. This was her first book for adults, a memoir of her childhood, describing her experience being raised in Helsinki by artist parents.

“The smaller you are the bigger Christmas is. Under the Christmas tree Christmas is vast, it is a green jungle with red apples and sad, peaceful angels twirling around on cotton thread keeping watch over the entrance to the primeval forest. In the glass ball the primeval forest is never-ending. Christmas is a time when you feel absolutely safe. Thanks to the Christmas tree.”

'When Sculptor's Daughter was published in Finland in 1968, readers longed for more. But Tove Jansson's response was firm – another bid for invisibility: "No, I'm not going to let the sculptor's daughter grow any older… I'm not the least bit interested in trying to describe what happened to her later; it's only the child's way of experiencing things that interests me."'