Art in Nature, By Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was a Finnish author and illustrator who wrote in Swedish (Finland's second language) and has been ably translated into American English by Thomas Teal. Her famous newspaper comic strip, The Moomins, became a children's illustrated book series whose troll-ish characters played both with Nordic folk history and with the legacy of Jansson's own "hippy" background.

In her fifties, Jansson began publishing novels, including The Summer Book and The Winter Book, a best-selling collection of short stories. Her adult fiction takes a darker look at a country where light and blackness alternate, confusing definitions of night and day, land and lakes, and seas, skies and horizons. They provide the settings for this collection, which explores unlikely relationships to surprising conclusions.

Many stories revolve around the nature of obsession: The Cartoonist, mysteriously vanished from his desk at the newspaper where his replacement cannot escape his ghost; the draughtsman who designs locomotives and can only pursue a woman who shares his fascination on a journey to three equally dramatic destinations; an actress who wishes to mine the character of a timidly retiring cousin in achieving a supreme role, but finds the emulation replacing exploitation. All are personalities seeking to appropriate another, with unexpectedly delicate as well as disastrous consequences.

The title story transfers the appropriation to that of nature by art and inverts it, as it does the relationship between gallery caretaker and art collector. The cast appear drawn from life, mainly artists and writers living outside traditional families. None directly matches Jansson's own situation as a lesbian living with a life-partner, but The Doll's House – as sinister and dramatic as anything in an Ibsen play – explores the relationship between a gay couple subverted by a third male joining their project to build the toy house.

This collection affords a strange encounter between Edgar Allan Poe and Ali Smith, yet offers readers a unique voice.