Fair Play
Readers rate it 3.7 (17 on Hardcover)
121 pages · Released Mar 15, 2011 · New York Review of Books
Content report card
Fair Play parent’s guide: what’s inside
Violence
Language
Scary or mature
Substance use
What it offers
Educational value
A note for parents
Fair Play is a lyrical, introspective novella celebrating a decades-long intimate relationship between two women artists. The book is fundamentally about mutual respect, creative partnership, and the complexities of long-term love, told with tenderness and maturity rather than explicit content. While LGBTQ+ themes are central and the relationship is romantic, the treatment is literary and non-graphic, making it suitable for older teens who appreciate character-driven fiction and artistic reflection.
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From the publisher
A New York Review Books Original Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating. Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their stu... A New York Review Books Original Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating. Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- Classics
- LGBTQ
- Women artists
- Female friendship
- Friendship, fiction
- Women artists, fiction
- Finland, fiction
- Fiction, general
- Female friendship--fiction
- Women artists--finland--helsinki--fiction
- Pt9875.j37 r4613 2010
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ISBN 9781590173787 · New York Review of Books