The Summer Book The novelist Philip Pullman described the book as "a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny." 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
Tove Jansson captured on several hours of film, shot by Pietilä. Several documentaries have been made of this footage, the latest being "Haru, yksinäinen saari" ("Haru, the lonely island") (1998) and "Tove ja Tooti Euroopassa" ("Tove and Tooti in Europe") (2004). Jansson died on 27 June 2001 at the age of 86 from cancer and is buried with her parents and younger brother Lars. She is buried in the Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki. Tove Jansson worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Swedish-language satirical magazine "Garm" from the 1930s to 1953. One of her political cartoons achieved a brief international fame: