In one instance, Mari wonders if the duo's cinematic obsessions risk them losing their own identities to someone else's work of art. In this world, a random night of movie watching provides the setting for chummy-though reverential-dinner parties, in which 'Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder, and all the other honoured guests' visit with their two new friends for a couple of hours.

Only here, the games are less about recreation than they are conversational methods that enliven humdrum, unavoidable activities that alter lives in the process. We're in the territory of whimsy and play, where adults turn to pursuits more commonly chased by children. 'Jonna had the happy ability to wake up every morning as if to a new life, which stretched before her right through to evening, clean, unspent, rarely shadowed by yesterday's worries or mistakes,' the novel begins. Without artifice, Jansson depicts a seemingly magical relationship by how they perceive what is around them and then transform that into something else which reflects back upon their own friendship. The smaller the moment, the more their relationship is pushed to the forefront of the narrative. We encounter the two women lost in a fog, vacationing, fishing, or simply rearranging photos on a wall.

They are each other's closest friend, foil, critic, and, in a manner of speaking, love. Its premise is simple: through a series of vignettes we look in on the lives of two female artists, Mari and Jonna, who live on opposite sides of an apartment building. Fair Play, a book for adults, was published in 1989 and is now, for the first time, being published in the US. Jansson, a Finnish writer and artist who died in 2001, is known principally for her Moomin books, a series for children about a family of furry trolls. It is a quiet novel, but unlike most such novels, which proceed at a leisurely pace, Fair Play is a page-turner. Were it possible to measure novels in decibels, as though the action left some sonic footprint on the world, Tove Jansson's Fair Play would perhaps emit the lowest levels.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson