A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbors 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 milieu, the restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.