The Real Deal Guide to Finnish Happiness Paperback

What Finns actually do and which bits work if you don't live in a forest.

Finland has been the happiest country on earth for nine years running and it does not look like cheering. It looks like a man alone on a jetty, delighted.

By any sensible reckoning Finland shouldn't work. It's too cold, too dark, too quiet and too far from everything, yet it keeps topping the table. Joel Willans has lived there for over twenty years and written two books about its problems. In this one he works out why the place functions at all and which parts of it you can steal without moving to a forest.

The seven types

• The No Niin Native finds happiness in a vocabulary nobody else can pronounce.
• The February Cyclist finds it on the far side of something unpleasant and is already halfway across.
• The Perkele Whisperer finds it in one word, said quietly and with real feeling.
• The Löyly Masochist finds it at eighty degrees and climbing, reaching for the ladle.
• The Mökki Vanisher finds it somewhere with no road to it.
• The Fluent in Silencer finds it about four seconds after everybody stops talking.
• The Pulla Diplomat finds it in a full pot and somebody else's bad day quietly getting better.

A whole Finnish year

You'll then follow all seven from the ice hole in January to the Christmas sauna in December, by way of bog football, Easter witches, berry picking in total silence and a month named after the dead. Each month belongs to the type who copes best when it comes round.

Every chapter ends with what anyone can use, wherever they live. The final chapter is an honest ledger of what transfers, what doesn't and what it costs. You can't have the forest by Friday. You can start on the rest by Tuesday.

It's meant to be funny, useful and checkable. Every study is named on the page, from a twenty-year Finnish heart study to a laboratory that paid people to swear.

It runs to 176 pages in paperback, on cream paper with pen and ink drawings.