I loved this one; it may even be my favourite book of the challenge so far. It was regretful but not bitter, sardonic without being harsh, and it affirmed a lot of my own convictions about integrity and identity, about being the person one was born to be, as opposed to the person the world thinks one ought to be. It felt very human, very subtle, ( Read more... )

I talked in my last post about Tove Jansson, and we're still on that topic. Fair Play is another of her later books, written in 1989, and in structure it's pretty similar to The Summer Book: a series of chapters which are all very self-contained and, I think, could very well be read individually, but which add up to something a little more than the ( Read more... )

About the authorTove Jansson was a Finnish author and artist, part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. She was born in 1914 and died in 2001, and spent much of her later life living on an island in the Gulf of Finland with her partner, artist Tuulikki Pietilä (although I believe that for a time it was said that she lived alone), first in a ( Read more... )