In works like The Summer Book and The 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...

In works like The Summer Book and The 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 face their own mortality.