A short novel of rare beauty, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972) tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl spending the summer with her grandmother on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland.
Jansson is best known for the Moomins, the small hippo-like creatures she started drawing in her youth, and which later made her famous around the world. But she was also a remarkably prolific artist, who explored satirical illustration, painting, children’s literature and novels.
Finnish-born and Swedish-speaking, her writing sits comfortably within two major traditions of Scandinavian literature: one of imaginative children’s writers, from Hans Christian Andersen to Astrid Lindgren, and the other of fierce women writers that included Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame) and Selma Lagerlöf, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909.
