Description

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From the author of The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In works like The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as well as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart, but as full-blooded people, with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. And so it is no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s, she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American instution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds. She describes this world through several of its residents and employees making their way in an America riven by cultural divides and facing the death of its dream, as they confront their own mortality.

About the Author

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Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki, attended art schools in Stockholm and Paris, and upon her return to Finland in the 1940s won acclaim for her paintings and murals. It was in the left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, where Jansson's most famous creation, Moomintroll, made his first appearance. Jansson also wrote eleven novels and short-story collections for adults, including The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, and The Woman Who Borrowed Memories (all available as NYRB Classics).

Thomas Teal has translated Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, for which he was awarded the Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation from the Swedish for the years 2007 to 2009. He also translated, with Silvester Mazzarella, Jansson's short story collection The Woman Who Borrowed Memories. He lives in Massachusetts.