Introduction by Alexander Chee

Read by Orlagh Cassidy

On Sale: Oct 22, 2024
Publisher: Hachette Audio
ISBN-13: 9781668648100

$14.99

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ebook $18.00 $22.99 CAD
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From a renowned artist and writer, a deeply personal nature journal that includes sketches from her romantic partner, artist Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island’s flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson’s work, most famously in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin. Tove’s signature spare, quirky prose, and Tooti’s subtle ink washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative beauty, a chronicle of living peacefully in nature and observing the island’s ecology and character. Notes from an Island is both a work of artistic collaboration and an homage to the deep love the two women shared. One feels as if Jansson’s journal, with Tooti’s sketches tucked inside, has been unearthed like a treasure from under a pile of old quilts in the back of their rustic cabin.

Includes a companion PDF of images from the print edition.

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Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority; her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Jansson’s most famous creation is Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition who stars in Moomin, the long-running comic strip and series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan. Jansson wrote eleven novels and short-story collections for adults, including The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, and The Woman Who Borrowed Memories and is widely beloved as a leading voice in contemporary global literature. In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy.

If you never see me again in life after this book is published, it is because I left to find an island of my own at last.
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Tove Jansson

About the Author

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Jansson’s most famous creation is Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition who appears in Moomin, the long-running comic strip and series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan. 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 (New York Review Books Classics). In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy. Jansson and her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, continued to live part time in a cottage on the remote outer edge of Pellinge until 1991.

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