The finest instruction manual ever written for wasting a summer well.
The Summer Book
A little girl and her grandmother spend a summer on a Finnish island, discovering the pleasures and sorrows of simply being together.
226g
Weighs the same as Phone + Flour Tortilla
- Luxury Item
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction
The creator of the Moomins (if you know, you know) wrote this cult classic, about a summer a six-year-old and her grandmother spent on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, in 1972. The plot, such as it is, is not the thing. They build things, bicker, argue about God and death. The days pass. Sitting beneath everything, unnamed, is the recent death of the girl's mother. Jansson blends idleness and grief and wonder and intimacy into gleaming but almost offhand sentences. The finest instruction manual ever written for wasting a summer well.
Field notes
Jansson wrote The Summer Book after the death of her mother, Ham, drawing on Ham's relationship with her granddaughter Sophia, whose own mother had died several years earlier. Jansson later said the novel was one-third her niece's childhood, one-third her own, and one-third invention. An accomplished illustrator, she initially published it without pictures; when she illustrated later editions, she refused to show the faces of Sophia or her grandmother.