The Moonday Letters

The contemplative latest from Finnish author Itäranta (Memory of Water) eloquently demonstrates how deeply people need love even—or especially—in the presence of death. The story is largely told through hopeful letters addressed to missing ethnobotanist Sol Uriarte by their spouse, Lumi Salo. Sol’s science-based worldview might seem incompatible with healer Lumi’s spiritual awareness of other worlds, but both yearn for each other. Both are also disturbed by how the human colonists on Mars and Earth’s other extensions are shunning refugees from humanity’s dreadfully polluted home planet. Now Luni suspects that Sol may have been seduced by the Stoneturners, an environmental terrorist organization willing to risk unleashing a biological attack that will either save life on Earth or end it once and for all. A desperate Luni forces her most precious tool as a healer—her soul-animal, capable of traversing worlds—into a dangerous, otherworldly mission to trace Sol in hopes that the two can reunite in Moonday House, the psychic retreat that they’ve imagined together. Itäranta accomplishes an impressive amount of worldbuilding in Lumi’s letters and makes her longing for her soulmate palpable. The result is a quietly powerful meditation on the human need to share life and love with others. (July)