Paperback – 224 pages

From the author ofThe Summer Bookand creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In works likeThe Summer BookandThe True Deceiver, as well as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart, but as full-blooded people, with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. And so it is no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s, she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American instution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds. She describes this world through several of its residents and employees making their way in an America riven by cultural divides and facing the death of its dream, as they confront their own mortality.

Story Locale:South Florida

Publication History:First English pub. 1976; OP since