The Woman Who Borrowed Memories

Praise

“[Jansson] writes about these things with sparkling wit and a quirky sensibility.” —The New Yorker

“Complex, intriguing and haunting, Jansson’s unusual short fiction is bound to enchant an English-speaking audience just as it did a Swedish-speaking one many years ago.” —Shelf Awareness

“Jansson’s short stories are as yet unacknowledged small masterworks.” —Ali Smith

“They are tough as good rope, [Jansson’s stories], as smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air and wind as the Nordic summer.”—Philip Pullman
 
“It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature.” —The Guardian

“The Moomin books, and the years [Jansson] spent writing them, evidently stayed with her; the result was a stirring art, both light and dark, consoling and disturbing, spare and intricate. A simplicity of expression belies the mystery of Jansson’s art—ostensibly plain, teeming with profound delights and worries—all of which this reader’s stunted, sad-girl soul is grateful to have discovered.” —Sonya Chung, The Millions

“Twenty-six spare, slyly off-kilter stories…consider loneliness, family, aging and creative experience, sometimes all together…Windows crop up often in Jansson’s stories, reflecting the transparent wall between her lonely characters and their worlds but also Jansson’s expression of intangible thoughts and feelings with lucent prose.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The unique Swedish-speaking Finnish author Jansson, a daughter of two artists, continues to dazzle in singular narratives filtered through her sharp wit and beguiling imagination.” —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times