Book description
Travelling Light by Tove Jansson
“The precariousness of travel
is revealed in this unnerving new collection of
stories.”
Introduced by Ali Smith
Translated for the first
time from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella
Translated into English for the first time, Travelling Light
takes us into new Tove Jansson territory.
A professor arrives in
a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and
she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish
Island is thrown into disarray by an oddly intrusive child; an artist
returns from abroad to discover that her past has been eerily
usurped.
With the deceptively light prose that is her hallmark,
Tove Jansson reveals to us the precariousness of a journey - the
unease we feel at being placed outside of our millieu, the
restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.
The writer and artist TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) is best known as
the creator of the Moomin stories, which were first published in
English sixty years ago and have remained in print
since.
However, in her fifties she turned her attention to
writing for adults, producing a dozen novels and story collections,
including the classic, bestselling The Summer Book.
Travelling Light, written in Swedish in1987, is published for the
first time in English. Sort Of Books have also published The Summer
Book, A Winter Book, Fair Play and The True Deceiver.
Silvester Mazzarella is the editor and translator of The Poet Who
Created Herself; the letters of Edith Södergran (Norvik Press); and
Travelling Light by Tove Jansson. He translated six of the stories in
this collection.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge,
England. She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Hotel
World, Other Stories and Other Stories, and Girl Meets Boy. Her novel
The Accidental was named the 2005 Whitbread Novel
