Tove Jansson's most personal book and a homage by two artists to the island they loved. In her late-forties, Tove Jansson, helped by a maverick seaman called Brunstrom, raced to build a cabin on an almost barren outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for twenty-six summers Tove and her life 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 memoir and homage to the island the two women loved intensely and relinquished only when pressed by age. It is also a unique collaboration between two artists. Tove's spare, precise prose - diary entries, vignettes and extracts from Brunstrom's log - frame the subtle washes and aquatints created by Tuulikki. Together they form a work of meditative beauty.
Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.
Sort Of books completes the set of Moomin special collectors' edition hardbacks with the most popular title of them all...
Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.
Toffle is driven from his home by frightening noises of the forest. Too shy, at first, to approach the many colourful Moomin characters he passes along the way, he gains confidence by discovering a scared and lonely Miffle who needs his help.
Presents the colour Moomin picture book with its cut-out page designs and playful rhyming text.
The Summer Book 'TOVE JANSSON' WITH A FOREWORD BY ESTHER FREUD An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. This new edition, with a Foreword by Esther Freud, sees the return of a European literary gem - fresh, authentic and deeply humane. New and beautifully presented edition of a Scandinavian literary classic by Finland's most translated author should appeal to all ages dissolving boundaries between fiction, biography and travel.
Driving Over Lemons, a captivating book penned by the talented Chris Stewart, is a must-read for all. Published in 2020 by Sort of Books, this engaging work of art is a stand-out in its genre. Stewart, with his unique storytelling style, transports readers to a different world, making them feel as if they're part of the narrative. Driving Over Lemons is more than just a book; it's an experience that stays with you long after you've turned the last page. Don't miss out on this masterpiece from Sort of Books.
Tove Jansson's first book for adults was a memoir, capturing afresh the enchantments and fears of her Helsinki childhood. Restored to its original form, Sculptor's Daughter gives us a glimpse of the mysteries of winter ice, the bonhomie of balalaika parties, and the vastness of Christmas viewed from beneath the tree.
A little girl is transported with the help of magic glasses from the tedium of a summer afternoon into an exciting world of mangrove swamps, spluttering volcanoes and sea where birds fly upside down and wild things threaten to pounce. But she is not alone.
"e;A sorceress of the essay form."e; John Berger Five years after Findings broke the mould of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie subtly shifts our focus on landscape and the living world, daring us to look again at the 'natural', the remote and the human-made. She offers us the closest of perspectives and the most distant, too: from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, or the pores of a whale's jawbone under restoration, to satellites rising over a Scottish island, or the aurora borealis lighting up an iceberg-strewn sea. We encounter killer whales circling below cliffs, noisy colonies of breeding gannets, and paintings deep in caves. Written with precision, delicacy and personal recollection, Sightlines invites us to pause and look afresh at our surroundings.
Fair Play: novel by Tove Jansson Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. INTRODUCED BY ALI SMITH "e;So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm - and discreetly radical. Its publication is cause for huge celebration."e; Ali Smith, from her introduction to Fair Play. The writer and artist TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, which have been published in thirty-five languages. However, from 1968, she turned her attention to writing for adults. Fair Play was her last novel, written when she was seventy-five. Sort of Books have also published Tove Jansson's classic The Summer Book (2003) and A Winter Book: Selected Stories (2006), which draws from five collections to present the best of her short fiction. A charming, quietly radical and inspiring book, introduced by Ali Smith. First ever publication in English, in a translation by Thomas Teal.
Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.
Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design - with fold-out map of Moomin Valley.
Travelling Light by Tove Jansson The precariousness of travel is revealed in this unnerving new collection of stories."e; 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.
Assembles the cream of Levi and Cat's adventures in a 160pp hardback - produced, with flat-bound, mirrored cover boards and colour printing throughout.
It's the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a 'real American'. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds - 'with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow' - that she has fallen in love. Lore Segal described Her First American as 'her favourite child', a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the charismatic Carter Bayoux, the glimpses he offers of New York's Black cultural life and the loneliness of addiction, are drawn with nuance, wit and truth. Segal illuminates from an outsider's perspective both the deep wounds of racism and a bright moment of Black American and Jewish solidarity.
We need to talk about The Cow in the Room. To reach net zero, we need a revolution in energy, transport and food. While most of us are switched on to wind and solar electric vehicles, we show a blind spot when it comes to the simplest, most urgent step we can take - giving up beef. If cows were a country, they'd be the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the USA. They produce huge quantities of methane. Livestock farming has fouled and squandered our natural resources, is insanely cruel and it's killing us. Eating too much meat leads to obesity and heart disease. It doesn't have to be this way. Cut down on meat (and up your fruit and veg) and you'll slash your carbon footprint and likely live longer, with better health. Eat whatever you like while you read this book ... and make your own mind up.
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
Essential reading for any lover of the Moomins. This is where it all began. Created in 1945, yet published in this country for the very first time, The Moomins and the Great Flood offers an extraordinary glimpse into the creativity and imagination that launched the Moomin books. Moominmamma and young Moomintroll search for the long lost Moominpappa through forest and flood, meeting a little creature (an early Sniff) and the elegantly strange Tulippa along the way. Tove Jansson illustrates her first ever Moomin adventure with stunning sepia watercolour and delightful pen and ink drawings. A revelation for Moomin fans.
Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but 'elective cousins'. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to - a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares - the institute's director and his wry, acerbic wife - hold the key?In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. Includes the acclaimed New Yorker podcast story, "The Reverse Bug".
According to Stephen Marche, if you want to be a writer then you'd better be ready to hurl yourself at the door, again and again. In his pithy and erudite essay Marche outlines how perseverance, in the teeth of rejection, forms the essence of a writer's life. It's what it takes, so no whining. Even successful writers grapple with failure. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche illustrates his thesis with vignettes of literary history, from Samuel Johnson, 'broke as f**ck', to Jane Austen signing lousy deals, to Herman Melville earning a pittance and ending his days as a customs inspector. Yet for new and seasoned writers his words are salutary, and, in a paradoxical way, consoling. All writers are up against it. Why should you be different?
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