The Summer Book The Summer Book The Summer Book (in the original Swedish Sommarboken) is a book written by Finnish author Tove Jansson in 1972. An elderly woman and her six-year-old granddaughter Sophia spend a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland exploring, talking about life, nature, everything but their feelings about Sophia's mother's death and their love for one another. The novelist Ali Smith, reviewing the book in "The Guardian", wrote that Jansson was better known for her Moomin books than for her novels, and that with her worldwide fame, she knew the virtues of withdrawal. In Smith's
Sophia Jansson "Jaana" in 1965. In May 2003, The Finnish Embassy in London arranged for events to surround the recent translation of Tove Jansson's 1972 "Sommarboken", a novel which featured the fictionalized life of the young Sophia on an island. During this event, publishers presented works by Sophia Jansson and Johanna Sinisalo. Jansson was later interviewed in June 2003 by "The Daily Telegraph" where she explained the details surrounding the story presented in "Sommarboken" and the relationship shared between Jansson and her aunt, Tove Jansson. She would write in more detail about this topic in 2006 in the Scandinavian Review, and again