‘A marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom. It’s about how people can live close together for months with tact and grace, and about how rich and rewarding even a small world can be.’ Melissa Harrison, The Guardian ‘ The Summer Book’s limpid style belies a deep psychological subtlety. What might, in less skilful hands, have been mawkish or twee, maintains to the last sentence a precise and rigorous habit of observation, an acute sense of the play of emotion between people and the landscape they inhabit, and a remarkable ability to render accurately the emotions of the very old and the very young.’ Jane Shilling, The Scotsman the story clings on to the imagination like the trusting hand of a child, or the clutch of an elderly woman.’ Jonathan Heawood, The Observer ‘Few books since Robinson Crusoe have evoked the joys of island living so powerfully as this slim Finnish novel. Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.’ Robert MacFarlane This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of her’s, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. ‘Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer – its sunlight and storms – into twenty-two crystalline vignettes.

Absent of sentimentality, it is full of love and humor and wisdom.’ Elizabeth Gilbert, The New York Times ‘This slim, magical, life-affirming novel tells the story of a young girl and her grandmother, who spend their summers together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. Jansson was a writer who knew the proper magnitudes of our small worlds.’ Ali Smith, The Guardian Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth. ‘Jansson’s brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story. “Every so often, a book is published that captures something in us … The Summer Book is one of those.” Rachel Simhon, The Daily Telegraph “Jansson was a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry, and this is a book to treasure.” Philip Pullman

The summer book jansson