Riina Katajavuori
Riina Katajavuori (b. 1968) writes lyrical but precise prose about the everyday. She describes motherhood with its different dimensions touchingly, tangibly, and above all compassionately. Katajavuori’s poems have been translated into over twenty languages. She has also written a series of picture books.
Praise:
“ ‘Gifts’ is a modest, but ambitious novel about motherhood –– narrated with an original voice.”
– Helsingin Sanomat
Written by Riina Katajavuori | Illustrated by Anne Vasko & Erika Kallasmaa
Olivia Cooks
A picture book with vivid images that are the result of an exceptional collaboration between two acclaimed illustrators.
Little Olivia feels like drawing or playing with her big brothers Ollie and Ossie, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. What are Mom and Dad up to? Dad’s washing the laundry and Mom’s reading. Olivia wishes she could do the laundry and read, too! But that doesn’t work either.
Written by Riina Katajavuori
Gifts
A story about mothers and generations, and how wishes and expectations are passed from one generation to the next.
Tuulia is a housewife with a husband and two children. She is adamant about staying home as long as their youngest is still small, but at times she longs to return to the safer, more familiar halls of academia.
How to pass the tests of motherhood and parenting without flunking? Tuulia feels that she is an intermediary, carefully weighing her values and attitudes before passing them on. Her social life is also restructured, as other mothers step into view: a peer group with which she can share the growing pains of the playground.
Gifts is a novel that seeks to find the roots of the everyday, to remember the things that we often forget. Life with children is not an epic tale, but one built up of small, often irrelevant little events and associations – the details that are effaced in the face of more dramatic life changes.
Shortlisted for the Runeberg prize in 2004
Elina Ahlbäck Literary Agency Oy Ltd.
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