But the great story is the one I left till last because it looked too dreary for a winter’s day, ‘The Story of Mats Israelson’. It is about the perfectly preserved corpse of a young man brought up from a disused copper mine after 49 years, only identifiable by the old crone who was once his fiancée. The situation is metaphorically relived by a contemporary pair of lovers who pass years of unconsummated love in inanition and bewilderment. He is a forester with sawdust in his beard. She is a chinless little woman with a blue ribbon in her straw hat. They meet for the first time on the ferry that plies the lake, towards the mines and past the great forests, and it is local gossip that discovers their love before they have understood it themselves. The man is married to a scold and the woman to a bore. The little town watches.

And nothing happens. Nothing. Year after year, nothing. It’s ‘The Statue and the Bust’ (Browning). Nothing. Nothing until the man is dying in a hospital across the lake. All takes place in a still, rather sinister watercolour landscape, most beautifully suggested. It reads like Turgenev or Aitmatzov. Not Chekhov, for the pair admit that they are without imagination.

But we love them and the depth of their longing makes us weep for them and long for warmth and good red wine, and hate the cruel northern lights.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP