The True Deceiver

By Tove Jansson

Snow has been falling on the village all winter long, and there is little to do but trade tales. Everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, ventures out from her large, empty house only in spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. Anna has something Katri wants – and by the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict that threatens the equilibrium of the whole village.

Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel works almost like a quiet psychological thriller: nothing much happens on the surface but the undercurrents are fierce and dangerous.
 

“Jansson wrote “The True Deceiver,” one of her greatest novels, when she was in her late sixties. Riveting, original, and strange, it concerns Anna Aemelin, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, who lives alone and whose life is infiltrated—for better and worse—by Katri, a mysterious loner, who behaves at once like an assistant and a grifter. Anna has been endowed with Jansson’s preoccupation with maintaining an image—that performance as a gentle, cultivated, enraptured child of nature.”
– The New Yorker

Publishing information

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About the author

Tove Jansson (1914-2001), Finnish-Swedish writer and artist, achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomins, written and illustrated between 1945 and 1970. The books about the brave, adventurous, yet family-focused and home-loving Moomins have been translated into more than 60 languages and are still in print all over the world today.The Moomins were, of course, only a part of Jansson’s prodigious output. Already admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, cartoonist and illustrator, she would go on to write a series of classic novels and short stories. She remains Scandinavia’s best-loved author.Tove Jansson’s work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family and nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. “Work and love” was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising.