In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietilä, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes. Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty. '... Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing. She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It's all peace and quiet now.'

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunstroem, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietila, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes. Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a chronicle of this period and a homage to the mature love that Tove and 'Tooti' shared for their island and for each other. Tove's spare prose, and Tuulikki's subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty. '... Tooti wandered aimlessly around the island and stood stock still for long periods. I thought I knew what she was doing. She was working again. Copperplate etchings and wash drawings. Mostly the lagoon, the lagoon as a consummate mirror for clouds and birds, the lagoon in a storm, in fog. And the granite, first and foremost, the granite, the cliff, the rocks. It's all peace and quiet now.'

In the summer of 1947, a young priest, Petter, his wife and baby daughter, arrive by mail boat at a tiny island. They are to take over its drafty homestead from where Petter is to minister to the scattered community. In this evocative tale, Ulla-Lena Lundberg draws us into the minutiae of an austere yet purposeful life where the demands of self-sufficiency - cows to milk and sheep to graze - are tempered by the kindness of neighbours. With each season, the family's love of the island grows and when the winter brings ice a new and tentative link is created. Told through the eyes of Petter, the wholehearted if naive novice priest, and Mona, his tough-minded wife, a story unfolds that is as immersive as it is heartrending. Winner of the Finlandia prize and nominated for the Nordic Critics Prize, Ice was a huge bestseller in Finland.

The rich seam that is Jansson's adult prose continues with this penultimate collection of short stories, written in her seventies at the height of her Moomin fame and translated into English for the first time. In these light-footed, beautifully crafted yet disquieting stories, Jansson tells of discomfiting encounters, unlooked for connections and moments of isolation that span generations and decades. Letters From Klara proves yet again her mastery of this literary form.

In her first ever story collection, Jansson revealed the clarity of vision and light philosophical touch that were to become her hallmark. From the good listener who begins to betray the secrets confided to her, to vignettes of a city storm or the slow halting of spring, these stories are gifts of originality and depth.

An NYRB Classics Original
Tove Jansson excelled at the brief tale, writing stories that in their short spans unfold to reveal entire worlds. This is true of her internationally syndicated cartoon strip about a family of hippo-like creatures, the Moomins; of her beloved Moomin novels; and of her best-selling books for adults, like "The Summer Book." Until now, however, Jansson's short stories have been nearly impossible to find in the United States. This volume brings together, for the first time in English, a generous selection of stories from the most fruitful period of her career, from her earliest collected stories, dating from the early 1970s, to her mature work, written not long before her death in 2001. In them are moments of the sublime and the mundane, as well as small heroisms and large griefs. Unsentimental, yet kind and humane, Jansson's short stories complement and enlarge our understanding of a giant of world literature.

A New York Review Books Original
Deception--the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others--is the subject of this, Tove Jansson's most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, "The Summer Book," to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.
Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody's talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children's book illustrator, appears to be Katri's opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna's life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.

In "The Summer Book" Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer--its sunlight and storms--into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. "On an island," thinks the grandmother, "everything is complete." In "The Summer Book," Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.
Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in "The Summer Book," and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.
"The Summer Book" is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

A New York Review Books Original

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation

"Fair Play" is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.
Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they've never really stopped taking each other by surprise. "Fair Play "shows us Mari and Jona's intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other's work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's "The Summer Book"), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.

Fredrik Sjoeberg's Swedish bestseller about summer, islands, freedom and boundaries. 'The light, the warmth, the smells, the mist, the birdsong - the moths. Who can sleep? Who wants to?' Fredrik Sjoeberg finds happiness in the little things. Millions of them, in fact. This beguiling bestseller is his unique meditation on collecting hoverflies. It is also about living on a remote Swedish island, blissful long summer nights, lost loves, unexpected treasures, art, nature, slowness, and how freedom can come from the things we least expect. 'Full of charm, a book about how to find meaning in life' Melissa Harrison, The Times, Books of the Year 'I often return to The Fly Trap, it remains close to my heart. The minute observations from nature that reveal sudden insights into one's life. Sometimes I almost think that he wrote it for me' Tomas Transtroemer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 'Charming, witty and original' Patrick Barkham, Guardian 'Nature writing that can laugh at itself, a real tonic' Gregory Day, Sydney Morning Herald 'Delightful, at once informative and often humorously digressive . . . a humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, Sjoeberg writes with infectious passion' Paul Binding Independent Fredrik Sjoeberg collects hoverflies on the island Runmaroe, in the archipelago east of Stockholm. He is also a literary critic, translator, cultural columnist and the author of several books including The Art of Flight and The Raisin King, which form a trilogy with The Fly Trap.