Pompom and the Happy Year // Kumpulaakson Pompom ja iloinen vuosi

Pompom and the Happy Year
Otava 2009

By Nina Pirhonen

Coming soon as a smart device app!

The cover pretty much says it all. Or take a look at the author’s website. Pompom is a delightfully whimsical picture book series with a fascinating aesthetic connection to the author/illustrator’s fashion design sensibilities (Google her work for Nanso and Marimekko).

There are four books in the Pompom series. Contact the Otava Group Agency for rights information.

 

Day of the False King // Väärän kuninkaan päivä

Day of the False King
Otava 2012

by Kaarle Aho

Writing a documentary about controversial banker Toivo T. Ryynänen is a second chance for washed-up journalist Jyrki Nyrkki, who is trying to collect what shreds are left of his professional pride and win back the love of his wife.

A journey into the past of old money and the Baby Boom generation ensues, taking Jyrki back to his own childhood and the excesses of the 1980s. Everything seems to repeat over and over: whoever believes the most is the one who gets cheated.

When Ryynänen’s friend and business associate Paul Vihanti returns to Finland with a briefcase full of secrets, it will have an irreversible effect on the Finnish business world and Jyrki’s personal life.

In the end, who is pulling the marionette strings behind the scenes—who knows more than he is telling?

Kaarle Aho (b.1968, Helsinki) is a movie producer. He has a degree in history from Helsinki University. Day of the False King is his first novel.

Sample translation available from the Otava Group Agency.

 

Tatu and Patu in Helsinki // Tatu ja Patu Helsingissä

2012, Otava

By Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen

Now available for purchase in Finland! Akateeminen Suomalainen

Get ready for another rollicking ride with the boys from Oddsville, this time through the 2012 World Design Capital!



See also:

Tatu and Patu’s This is Finland (Published)

Tatu and Patu’s Adventures in Outer Space (Sample)

Tatu and Patu as Superheroes! (Sample)

Tatu and Patu’s Oddball Bedtime Book (Sample)

Tatu and Patu’s Amazing Alphabet (Sample)

The Running of the Bulls // Härkäjuoksu

Author Tuomas Lius

2011 Like

by Tuomas Lius

From the Otava Rights Guide:

A lovable rural rogue and a female detective who’s coming to terms with her past are searching for a
priceless historical treasure

Private investigator Marko Pippurinen from the rural village of Tohmajärvi has revived his detective agency with the help of his young friend, Pyry Lehikoinen. Then Julia Noussair, the other half of the duo familiar from Lius’ previous books, Haka and Outside the Law, appears out of nowhere with an intriguing offer. Marko eagerly seizes this opportunity, but by doing so he sets off a game that forces him
to put more at stake than ever before. Everything culminates in a high-speed treasure hunt through the Nordic wilderness.

An English sample is available.

On a Journey: The Martti Ahtisaari Story

The Ahtisaari Story by Katri Merikallio and Tapani Ruokanen

Otava, 2011

From Otava Foreign Rights:

The first authorised biography of the influential Finnish Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

How did a little boy who was evacuated during the war grow up to become the president of Finland, one of the most widely known Finnish decision-makers on the international stage and a leading global figure in crisis resolution? How has Martti Ahtisaari managed to get people to achieve peace, and what lies at the core of his approach? And where does this man, who turns 74 this year, plan to go from here?

This book includes Ahtisaari’s own thoughts on the various stages of his life, and the Nobel Peace Prize recipient’s own voice emerges clearly throughout the book. In the course of writing this book, the authors conducted interviews with Martti Ahtisaari himself. They also spoke to many key figures who have worked very closely with him, along with family members and friends from Finland and abroad. The result is a vivid, exciting and complex portrait of one of the great figures of our era.

Katri Merikallio is a journalist with Suomen Kuvalehti, a weekly news magazine. She is also the author of How to make peace: Ahtisaari and Aceh. Tapani Ruokanen is the author of numerous books and served as the editor-in-chief of Suomen Kuvalehti for many years.

An English sample is available

Tatu and Patu’s Adventures in Outer Space // Tatun ja Patun Avaruusseikkailu

Tatu and Patu's Adventures in Outer Space

Otava 2011

by Aino Havukainen & Sami Toivonen

From the 2011 Otava Foreign Rights Guide:

A universally weird intergalactic adventure that thrusts forward at hyperspeed and plunges readers into orbits of laughter!

The wildly fast-paced and utterly wacky series of adventures continues – this time, the brothers from Oddsville have a go at sci-fi. Tatu and Patu take off on an adventure across the universe – their mission is to defend galactic peace and perform other important feats of derring-do.

Tatu and Patu build their own spaceship for the trip. It’s not long before the interstellar adventure shuttle I.T.S.  Bananas shoots up into the sky. Space cadet A.T.L. Antic and star pilot Styrox Box, also known as Mr. Cool, head towards the furthest reaches of the universe. As the boys are checking whether there is air in the rings of Saturn, something bright, fast, and incredibly huge crashes into them. The wings of their spaceship catch on fire and they just barely escape to the safety of the Star Union mother ship.

There, they encounter not only their greatly admired Ro-He, commander of the Star Union, but also an enormous problem: a state of emergency has been announced throughout the entire universe, because an immense, unknown destructive force is moving through the solar systems. Planets have disappeared, and all the orbits are completely out of whack.

With the help of Antic and Box and the little girl Ring-Da, the Star Union resolves its urgent problem, but they need a healthy dose of Tatu and Patu’s ingenuity and courage as well as little Ring-Da’s insights and a gigantic finger before peace is restored to the universe.

Tatu and Patu’s Adventures in Outer Space is the second book in the series Tatu and Patu’s Adventures. Tatu and Patu: Superheroes! kicked off the series to a fantastic reception, sparking comments such as: “Once more, Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen demonstrate a fine understanding of what works on little boys and girls – and older ones, too.” – kaks’plus

A sample translation in English is available.

See also:

Tatu and Patu’s This is Finland

Tatu and Patu in Helsinki

Tatu and Patu as Superheroes!

Tatu and Patu’s Oddball Bedtime Book

Tatu and Patu’s Amazing Alphabet

The Oven / Uuni

The Oven by Antti Hyry

Winner of the 2009 Finlandia Prize for Literature.

A man builds a brick oven and ponders life. Events come and go, the bricks rise and remain. “He started to remember a model, an oven in the Hökkä’s cabin. It was nearly a meter high on the interior, of arching bricks, with an outlet for the flames in the back corner. The vents came forward at the top and then down the sides and then turned at the bottom toward the back wall and then from the back to meet in the middle of the oven and the current rose at the centre of the top of the oven, coming forward into the chimney that led from the brow of the oven
up to the roof.”

Summer comes. Although the oven is finished, the building continues. It’s about life, its continuation, permanence and transience. About the grasp of life that comes from doing.

Award-winning author Antti Hyry, one of our most esteemed writers, published his breakthrough novel, He Started from the Highway, in 1958. His 1999 The Granary was a nominee for the Finlandia Prize.

The Oven is Hyry’s tenth novel.

Antti Hyry’s texts have been published in thirteen languages, by Hinstorff
(Germany) and Bonniers (Sweden), among others.

(From the Otava Rights Guide)

From FILI:

In Hyry’s novel, the reader’s interest is not directed to a plot or character portraits. There are no dramatic turning points in this description of the construction of a baking oven. On the surface, Hyry’s writing is reminiscent of the kinds of modernists who build their texts on simple perceptions of the world of objects in order to emphasize incompleteness in their sketches of the world. Instead, the person in Hyry’s book is taking concrete steps to establish a home in the world. His tasks gain their significance from the meaningful places of life in its entirety. This portrait of everyday life thus opens out into a cosmos where the central character is living the life he was meant to live.

Sample Extract of The Oven/Uuni in English (PDF)

Tatu and Patu as Superheroes! / Tatu ja Patu Supersankareina

Otava, 2010.
By Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen

From Otava.fi:

Super fast, super fun, super weird! Super oddballs Tatu and Patu kick off their new, fantastic Incredible Adventures series!

Tatu thinks superheroes are awesome. “Just think how great it would be to run faster than a tall building or leap speeding bullets in a single bound. Or wait, was it….”

Tatu and Patu’s dream comes true: with the help of a televisioactive laser beam they transform from ordinary Oddsvillians into superheroes, who set out to battle super scoundrels and struggle against misrepresentation! They become Active Boy, protector of the weak and hurried, and Measure Man, defender of all that is good and precise in the world.

Soon enough, Hypercyberman needs their super skills to find out where all of the beautiful, old buildings of Ridiculopolis have disappeared to and who left a giant box labelled Ultramodern Administrative Centre of Excellence in the place where city hall used to be.

The unprecedented, breakneck pace and insane action will keep Oddsville fans of all ages riveted. Catchy slogans and super moves included at no extra charge!

Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen have been honoured with many awards, including the Finlandia Junior Prize. Their super-popular boys from Oddsville have made astounding breakthroughs in the real world, too: the rights to Tatu and Patu books have been sold to thirteen different countries and have already been published in translation by such publishing houses as Clavis, Édition Glénat, Kaisei-sha, Rabén & Sjögren, and Thienemann.

Also see Tatu and Patu’s This is Finland the Oddball Bedtime Book and my article in Books from Finland.

(A full English sample is available upon request)

Oddball Bedtime Book / Tatun ja Patun Outo unikirja

Otava, 2008

By Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen

From the Otava Rights Catalog:

An indispensable book for anyone who sleeps! This book has everything, from instructions for choosing a bedtime toy to a troubleshooting chart for insomniacs. As a bonus, the book includes the world’s most boring bedtime story. When goddaughter Satu is coming to spend the night at Tatu and Patu’s house, the boys go all out in preparation. Since they’ll have to put her to bed, they’ve composed a new treatise entitled On Dreams, Drowsiness, Bedtime, and Lovely Lullabies or O.D.D.B.A.L.L.

The book explains how to choose the perfect bedtime toy to achieve the optimum stuffed-toy density. There is a troubleshooting diagram for when sleep just won’t come. The boys also figure out how the length of fingernails affects back-scratching and how the soulfulness quotient of a lullaby affects the sleeper’s ability to achieve drowsiness.

The book also tells what really happens when you sleep and leads Tatu and Patu on a wild adventure in dreamland. The true meaning of sleep is made clear, and the terrifying consequences of prolonged night-owling are only too clearly revealed.

Going to Bed
(A full English translation is available upon request.)

Previously published: This is Finland. Also see Tatu and Patu in Helsinki, Tatu and Patu’s Adventures in Outer Space, Tatu and Patu: Superheroes!, and Tatu and Patu’s Amazing Alphabet.

Clearly Drunk / Selvästi juovuksissa

Otava, 2006

By Juhani Seppänen.

Helsingin Sanomat review

From the Otava 2006 Foreign Rights Catalog:

This book could change your attitude to alcohol – for good. The author spins the bottle and questions many of the things we take for granted about the demon drink, shaking up some long-held misconceptions.

Out of a population of around five million, Finland boasts around 500,000 “heavy users” of alcohol. Liquor is an everyday thing for increasing numbers of people, not to mention its use on festive occasions. Does the idea of a party with just a glass of water for company leave you shaken but not stirred?

Just who is dependent on alcohol? Is alcoholism a sickness, and where does the fault lie when the hard stuff leads people astray?

For Juhani Seppänen, who himself confesses to be among those heavy users, the idea of a year without a drink seemed impossible. He decided to try. The book tells what thoughts alcohol prompted in his mind. And how his “going dry” attempt fared.

As a health centre physician, Juhani Seppänen encounters on a daily basis people for whom alcohol has become a problem. Clearly Drunk passes on its lessons using the same cocktail of the amusing and the profound that was found in his earlier books And the First Word is “Daddy” (2000) and Working Like Mad (2004), both of which won attention, plaudits, and a host of enthusiastic readers.

Extract (PDF)

This is Finland / Tatun ja Patun Suomi

Otava Publishing. 2007. 48 pages. In 5th printing.

This is a children’s book written and illustrated by Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen (2007). It was awarded the 2007 Finlandia Prize for Children’s Literature. The artwork is pure genius–it captures contemporary Finnishness like few things I’ve seen. Even visiting Finland probably won’t give you nearly as intimate a look into what is important to Finns both in terms of where they’ve come from historically and what modern life is about. And it’s hilarious.

Sample pages:

Finnish oddities, Part 1: Sauna
Finnish oddities, Part 2: Rye bread
Tatu as Santa Claus

Article in Books from Finland (see links at left).

My article on the work of translating This is Finland.

Suomalainen.com bookstore listing.

Hiding Places / Piiloutujan maa

Aspasia Books. 2008. 109 pages.

This is a themed set of short stories by Petri Tamminen (Otava 2002). The starting point is the impulse toward seclusion–the original title is literally “land of the hider”.

PDF Sample

Article by Soila Lehtonen in Transcript.

Some of the pieces from the book were also previously translated by my colleague David Hackston and can be read in the Books from Finland archive here.

Tatu and Patu’s Amazing Alphabet // Tatun ja Patun Oudot aakkoset

Tatu and Patu's Amazing Alphabet

Otava, 2009

From the Otava Foreign Rights website:

The alphabet is led down memory lane with the boys from Oddsville, where there’s plenty of whacky humour and earth-shaking revelations about the crazy life they’ve lived! With an extra bonus letter: the mark of Oddsville!

Tatu and Patu find a box in the attic brimming with old photos and mementoes of years gone by.

The box is a true cornucopia: there are pictures of their trip to Barbados, a shot of the curling club disco, and one of the Christmas market in Järvenpää. They’ve even made their way into pictures from newspapers and mail-order catalogues. They also find Patu’s messed-up pose from the passport photo booth among the stash.

Included along the way are familiar adventures from the past, like a group photo of the Esikko day care and a series of documentary pictures of what happened when Tatu and Patu went on a picnic with Veera.

At the very bottom of the box is a picture of Oddsville, the place they were born in, but what a shame, the picture is badly worn…

The story of the successful rise to popularity of Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen’s picture books reached a peak when their book This is Finland won the Finlandia Junior Prize in 2007.

They have also received the 2001 Rudolf Koivu Prize and the 2006 Kaarina Helakisa Award, and their book Tatu and Patu in Helsinki was nominated for the Finlandia Junior in 2003. Other adventures of the celebrated brothers from Oddsville can be found in Tatu and Patu’s Oddball Bedtime Book, Tatu and Patu Go to Work, Tatu and Patu’s Mad Machines, Tatu and Patu at the Kindergarten, as well as the four Veera books.

Havukainen and Toivonen have also published two collections of their Home Truths comics for grown-ups.

The rights to the Tatu and Patu books have been sold in more than 10 countries, to publishers such as Kaisei-sha (Japan), Édition Glénat (France), Rabén & Sjögren (Sweden) ja Thinemann (Germany).

Finding even two pages in this one that could be translated sensibly was a challenge, for obvious reasons!

The Letter B
The Letters C and D



See also:

Tatu and Patu’s This is Finland (Published)

Tatu and Patu in Helsinki (Forthcoming)

Tatu and Patu’s Adventures in Outer Space (Sample)

Tatu and Patu as Superheroes! (Sample)

Tatu and Patu’s Oddball Bedtime Book (Sample)