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
Tove Jansson Flood". The next two books, "Comet in Moominland" and "Finn Family Moomintroll", published in 1946 and 1948 respectively, were highly successful in sales, adding to sales of the first book. For her work as a children's writer she received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966. Starting with the semi-autobiographical "Bildhuggarens dotter" ("Sculptor's Daughter") in 1968, Jansson wrote six novels, including the admired "Sommarboken" ("The Summer Book"), and five books of short stories for adults. Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire. Her family, part of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, was an artistic one: