Over the Hill, by the Sea

Tove Jansson's Sun City

Sun City. By Tove Jansson. New York: New York Review Books, 2025. 224 pp. $16.95.

Well into a career divided between painting, illustrating, and children’s books, Tove Jansson (1914-2001) started writing novels and short stories in her fifties, most of them about people a little older than that. A member of Finland’s Swedish speaking minority, Jansson was born, lived, and died in Helsinki. Her work would be translated into forty-five languages, and a comic strip she wrote for the London Evening News between 1954 and 1975 would reach millions of readers. There have been major exhibitions of her work, a documentary film, and a commemorative €10 coin. Meanwhile New York Review Books has been reissuing her work. Now, to its menu of grown-up Jansson fiction consisting of Fair Play, The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories, they are adding this edition of Sun City, her second novel, which was originally published in 1976. The contemporaneous translation is by Thomas Teal, who knew the author when he lived in Finland in the 60s.