True by Riikka Pulkkinen

"A novel about family, death, and dying in which in which a depressive young woman named Anna delves into the histories of her dying grandmother, her mother and her mother’s girlhood nanny (also the erstwhile lover of Anna’s grandfather). Anna inhabits the nanny’s itinerant past with such abandon that by the book’s melancholy final act, the two women’s lives, separated by decades, effectively merge. Pulkkinen spins variations on this theme of transformative identity, having characters periodically relate to one another as if they were improv artists: a child assumes fantasy personas in dress-up games with her grandmother; Anna and her grandfather invent biographies for passengers on public trams. In the device’s most mannered turn, two characters convey their innermost feelings to each other through third-­person badinage."