Petrone Print

Kaja, who knew two words in Finnish (terve and guudbai), ended up as a visiting lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä on the invitation of one of their professors. Things snowballed from there, though. The land of a thousand lakes had captured Kaja, and six months turned into X years.

“We have all these fixed stereotypes of our neighbors in our heads, but how much do we really know about what Finland and the Finnish people living there are like?” Kaja asks. In this book, she shares her experiences and impressions of Estonia’s northern neighbors: their temperamental nature, their backwards humor, their frugal way of thinking, and their big hearts.

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A blind possum is walking on the electrical wires like a cat, koalas that look like stuffed toys are munching on eucalyptus in the trees, and fast little geckos are whistling their tunes on the walls of the living room. The streetscape looks like a godless multicultural soup and English can be heard in an incredible array of accents.

Australia, land of dreams.

In Estonia, it seemed like I had it all, but my soul was restless. In the end, I left to go look for that dream of mine. I had a conversation with a red kangaroo friend, two meters tall, about Australian dreams and sped through thousands of kilometers of desert in giant trucks. I hauled pineapples and watermelons on a farm, sold lottery tickets in the city streets, and worked as a waitress, just like hundreds of other young Estonian world travelers. In the middle of all these adventures, I suddenly found what I had been looking for unbeknownst to myself.

Airi Ilisson-Cruz

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The book contains a selection of stories about the author’s life in New York published in her weblog and the Estonian media. There are stories about barbeques, weddings, fire escapes, tipping, September 11th, graveyards, amusement parks, weight watching, and much more.

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The author’s adventures and her adaption to life in America continue. Halloween paranoia, Thanksgiving traffic jams, Christmas lists, real estate searches, the ER, a nightclub, Misha from the laundromat, John with his ski cap, Inga with her broom, the mother-in-law with her home decorating ideas, and father-in-law with his five cell phones – and in the middle of this, an Estonian woman trying to find her way.

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She learns right there and then, in the midst of coastal range mountains where eagles fly and brownbears fish for salmon, that her restless soul isn’t necessarily a bad thing. She meets strangers who open their hearts to her, learns to work with hundreds of sled dogs (or is it the other way around?), starts to see the beauty and majesty surrounding her and most importantly, the change happens within: she learns to trust in herself.

Maria Kupinskaja

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What happened to me was what usually happens in fairy tales: I went out into the world and I found myself. I did fall in love too, but love is just a motor. Of course, at first it wasn’t easy. There were failed attempts to get published, earning almost nothing as a barmaid and a dancer, which didn’t spare me from hunger, feeling like a stranger and coming to terms with that knowledge. On top of everything, your country of origin, your appearance, and your accent are something that automatically pin all kinds of suspicions on you in the eyes of the locals. Well, alright then! You just have to start building yourself and your identity up from scratch again.

Anna-Maria Penu

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I’m sure that each one of us has an association when it comes to Italy, whether it is Italian football, fashion, or food. One thing is certain – this country doesn’t leave anyone cold. The covers of this book hide my Italy, my ordeals at the immigration office, falling in love with pesto and limoncello, relations in the academic world, and painful lessons about dinner etiquette. My Italy actually begins in Finland, moves from a gray dormitory room to the mysterious and colorful old city of Genoa, from there to the cliffs, fishing villages, olive groves, and pine nut forests of Northern Italy.

I don’t know yet where and how my Italy will end.

Kristiina Praakli

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Iceland. This sparsely populated island far out in the Atlantic Ocean is probably the single most exotic location in Europe. Linguistically Iceland is like a refrigerator, where their Nordic language has been preserved in its most primeval form for thousands of years. The nature is also primeval and it is the most common reason why tourists go to Iceland, to look for clear mountain lakes, knee-high birch forests, and the rainbow colors of volcanic mud. Sometimes this nature is awe-inspiringly powerful – during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or killer snowstorms.

This book contains the experiences of a musician living in Iceland: his adventures with avalanches and sheep herds, swimming in underground rivers, bathing in the hot steam of a mountain, baking bread in the hot ground, and other stories. The author is part of a group of local Estonian music teachers called the ‘Estonian mafia’ that has come direct a number of Icelandic music schools.

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Where did the Chanel wigs go? Why does an apartment owner in Paris want to see a tenant’s income declaration? What was my closet-sized attic apartment like? Where are the prestigious places to live in Paris? How are models chosen for a show? What is the real Parisienne like? What are the most interesting restaurants in Paris like? How much time does a Frenchman spend vacationing?

In this book you will find the answers to these questions and many more. This book is a fun anthropological study, with absurd situations as well as practical tips for survival, where I also share my observations on France, the French people, on Paris and Parisians. I provide a small inside look at the everyday life of Frenchmen, their particularities, habits and traditions. But this is also my personal story – about how I happened to arrive in this new environment and what I had to do to adapt here.

Urmas Väljaots

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Mai Loog moved to Thailand 11 years ago. Together with a British boyfriend she met online, they chose this Orient’s land of smiles. Now Mai is single again, but still lives and works in Bangkok. The sensual and exotic surroundings of tropical Thailand have opened her up in a way that many childhood friends in Estonia considered bizarre at first. Why does Mai make music videos where she dances around in expensive lace lingerie or sparkling bikinis? How do Mai’s bunny ears fit with her PhD and the analysis of Thailand’s political situation she offers for the Estonian media? „I am a modern woman, I am a sex subject, and I enjoy it!” says Mai. She expands on this topic in the book.

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I don’t know how would it be possible to live in a country ignoring what is happening there. You do take things into your heart. Sooner or later this country becomes your homeland, too.

You will be worrying about how ordinary people are making their ends meet, what kind of education do children receive in schools where retired teachers earn extremely low wages and whether the young girls who are dreaming of rich Western boyfriends will be trafficked to slavery or not.

I found extremely lovely and dear people in Moldova and, at times, hostile and harsh system. It is indeed quite difficult to fall in love with Moldova right away – you will experience indifference and impoliteness on the streets and there are no breathtaking mountains or beautiful beaches to counterbalance the sad feeling.

But nevertheless I’m convinced that Moldova is worth of a friendly pat on the back: It’s time to rise!

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A former business journalist leaves her comfortable life in Estonia and moves to Buenos Aires to work in a poor area of the city. The author relates how she fought cockroaches at a day care center and then ended up becoming the boss of international volunteers. How she met whales and penguins. How she couldn’t bring herself to interview cartoneros – people who make their living by going through others’ rubbish. How the relationships played out in a shared flat called “Fight Club”. But what surprised her the most when she returned to Estonia some 14 months later?

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The book brings together different topics about the environment. Here you will read columns written for the web portal Green Gate (Roheline Värav), excerpts from a weblog, short interviews with Estonian experts, and summaries from English-language bestsellers about the environment. It’s a compilation of the general and the specific, distant and close information. Why is there famine in Africa, why are the world seas polluted, where to take your old computer, how to cut back on electricity use at home, how to make home repairs in an environmentally friendly way? In addition to tips on living green, you can also find a green self-analysis in this book: is environmental awareness a new religion? Can one person alone change something in this consumer-centered world?

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This is a book for children and for those who are children at heart.

Author of the text Epp Petrone: “This story is something that happened to me when I was six years old and staying in the countryside with my grandmother and grandfather. It was the last summer before I had to go to school and one day, near the tilia tree, I witnessed a miracle.”

The book is illustrated by Kamille Saabre.

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Icebreaker was first published in black and white by Valgus Publishing in 1986. The first half of the book was made up of short stories and the other half took the reader on a voyage with personal correspondence.

The new Icebreaker is a supplemented and shortened version. Color photographs and a previously cut story about the migration of birds in the fall have been added. At the same time, we left out all the travel correspondence of the original, because the world seen through Soviet eyes doesn’t fit today with these timeless pictures of nature in our homeland.

The stories have not been changed. What has changed, however, is the significance and purpose of the book. The significance has become clearer and the purpose more difficult to fulfill, because the world is different now.

Fred Jüssi

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This collection of short stories is a series of first-person fictional confessions, where a narrator describes all the men in her life in alphabetical order. Is the narrator one and the same throughout the whole book? That’s up to the reader to decide.

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The debut novel of singer Tui Hirv is about a young woman making her first steps in life and classical music. Emotions heat up thanks to a strange relationship with a love from her past, by balancing what is permissible and what isn’t with older male colleagues and teachers and, of course, by the music itself.

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This book is a mosaic of the pieces of Estonia’s most widely read and legendary blog, where over the course of a symbolic year we get to participate in the melodramatic life of a young woman stepping out into the world, who, in her own words, is bipolar and manic depressive. The book doesn’t have a strict timeline of events: different springs, summers, autumns, and winters have been put together. The form is also free: the various events have been put down in writing as free-form poetry, short plays, anecdotes, a mix of comedy and tragedy.

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When Mushrooms Still Spoke is the second in a series of books about the relationship between a young girl and the natural world.

“My mother taught me how to open my heart to understand the stories of the trees, mosquitoes, and dogs,” writes author Epp Petrone. “What happened to us when we went to the forest to pick mushrooms, got lost, and the sun disappeared? Were we able to hear over the other voices in the forest to notice the sounds of the apple trees in our garden calling us home?” 

At first glance, this poetic book is the simple tale of a mother and daughter picking mushrooms in the woods. But it is also about communication, not just between people, but between people and their environment.

With vivid, inspiring illustrations by Kamille Saabre, When Mushrooms Still Spoke weaves mystery into everyday life, giving voices to nature, voices that readers of this book are reminded they too may have once heard.

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The first draft of this book was delivered to the author’s daughter Marta as a gift for her third birthday. Three years later, this 90-page collection of short stories about an imaginative little girl was published.

With colorful and moving illustrations by artist Piia Maiste, Marta’s Toes is both deeply personal and universal. In it, the author tells quick tales of her daughter’s encounters with an outside world where the unnoticed details of daily life can take on extraordinary meaning.

Marta lives in a world where the bubbles in her bathtub whisper to her, where planes wave at her from the sky, where she is befriended by ladybugs, and where she greets her toes in the morning and they talk back to her. Seen through a child’s eyes, Marta’s Toes also is an account of a young girl developing relationships with her mother and father and grandparents, adapting to life in a new home, and trying to understand what it means when someone dies. Altogether, Marta’s Toes provides a fresh perspective on the joy and warmth of everyday family life.

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A bulky envelope in the mailbox brings an unexpected change to our lives. Our stay in Sweden, where we had moved to avoid Tom’s possible recruitment to the Soviet Army, turns out to be quite brief. We find a new home in Canada that until now has been distant and unfamiliar, more like a country with vast white snowy fields and wild wolves, but in reality, it surprises us with its warmth and friendliness.

Canada has been sometimes referred to as invisible in the world, but this beautiful country has many exciting sides. Different nations who have found a new home in Canada keep their customs and traditions, forming a cultural mosaic with first nations and inuit. But what does it mean to be a child growing up in an immigrant family? How do my own daughters who were born in Canada feel – are they Canadians or Estonians? And what does it mean for us to move from an European monocultural Estonia to a place where people of different backgrounds live side by side just as in “Star Trek”?

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This collection includes the short stories of 19 authors. These authors are connected together by their age. Most of them were born in the 1980s.

Dagmar Lamp, the compiler of the collection and one of the authors, says that the book “looks like our generation. It looks like us, the youth, who have the whole world before us. We don’t remember anything about the struggle for a free Estonia. The memories of the Baltic chain or tanks on the streets are increasingly distant and foreign for us. We did not have our big war – and this is our bane. We look and we search, sometimes finding, at other times losing.”

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When it was first published, this book became incredibly successful because of frank discussion of sexuality, but it also drew a lot of criticism for the same reason. Even though this series of portraits about different young women discussed how the changes Estonia was undergoing were impacting young people, this aspect of the book went almost unnoticed.

When she heard about the sequel, one of my good colleagues listed all the things that could have happened to the characters from the first book: they could be divorced and struggling with getting alimony, they could have married abroad and come back, some may have reached the top and remained lonely in their personal life, some may have died … But, actually, that’s exactly the way it is. A person can’t be more creative than the Creator himself.

Kati Murutar)

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The second part of the book: a series of portraits about different young women in the changing Estonian state during the last 20 years.

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This collection consists of six plays, written 1995–2005. Theatrical, spirited, and full of feminine zeal, the plays concern Zarah Leander, and the relationship between a priest and a dancer, the muse and lover of a famous singer, one man’s harem, and one woman’s worries. Every play includes a foreword by the author that reveals the background of the piece.

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