The Moonday Letters, by Emmi Itäranta

Isn't that a gorgeous cover?

The book is an odd, dreamy work of epistolatory science fiction/fantasy, mostly in the form of unsent letters written by Lumi to her nonbinary spouse Sol. She's in the habit of writing a journal of letters to Sol, as they both often travel separately throughout the solar system for work, and giving them to Sol when they reunite. But this time, their reunion keeps getting delayed, and she keeps arriving at places just after Sol has left. Is Sol evading their own spouse, and if so, why?

The plot sounds like a mystery, but it's structured as a quest and feels like an unusually detailed dream. Beautiful images swim in and out, and moments feel fraught with a meaning just out of grasp. At one point Lumi visits Europa, whose cities are under the sea and where everyone speaks only in whispers, and even those only when absolutely necessary, because loud noises could crack the ice. In true dream fashion, that doesn't really make sense, but it's vivid and compelling.

Lumi follows in Sol's footsteps, occasionally gaining clues, while thinking back on their relationship and realizing that maybe she doesn't know Sol as well as she thought. She's from an Earth which has been radically restructured and is largely a playground for wealthy visitors, while the people actually live there are poor and often desperate to get difficult-to-obtain passports out; she apprentices with a woman who does magical soul healing with a spirit animal, gets her own spirit animal, and also a passport to Mars; many years later, she's still uneasily conscious of her status as an immigrant.

Lumi travels often within the solar system as a soul healer, always accompanied by her cat Ziggy; the difficulties of traveling with a cat are realistically detailed, and Ziggy is very present in the story without ever affecting the plot. We eventually learn that she had another cat who was euthanized when the space station she and Sol lived on was shut down due to a plague, and only humans were allowed off. Is that why Lumi is so determined to never leave Ziggy behind? She doesn't say. Is Lumi's soul healing real? Sol doesn't believe in it, but Lumi's spirit animal feels as present, when it appears, as Ziggy. (Ziggy survives. Lumi's spirit animal may or may not, it's complicated.)

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I'm not sure if some of the book's oddities - Lumi's extreme calm, Sol's unknowability, the emotionally distanced feeling in a story whose action is entirely driven by a marriage, the very open ending - are flaws or exactly what the author intended. I enjoyed reading it a lot, because it's so atmospheric and I will forgive a lot for atmosphere, and it feels so different from most books.

Itäranta is Finnish and wrote her first two books in Finnish and English simultaneously! Not sure if she did the same for this one.