The Summer Book [Paperback]

Beautifully-written, 'The Summer Book' focuses upon the relationship between a little girl, Sophia and her wilful, yet wise grandmother as they spend the summer together on a remote Finnish island.

Based on Jansson's own family experiences and love of nature, the stories are deceptively simplistic. The author manages to cram a huge amount of ideas, observations and description into a relatively short space without being sentimental or over-descriptive. The characters are excellent. The grandmother and Sophia are feisty individuals who enjoy questioning the world and their conversations can be at times, both hilarious and touching.

This edition has also been produced with real care. Esther Freud's foreword is probably one of the most fascinating that I have read in a long time(she visits the island and meets the 'grown-up' Sophia) and the inclusion of photographs of the island and Jansson's family only adds to the slightly sad beauty of the novel.

For me, it sums up what great literature should be. It's an easy and enjoyable book to read, but you leave with the impression of having touched on some huge ideas. I'm looking forward to reading it many times over in the future.

I came to this book with misgivings. It was a choice for our book club, and I approached it thinking it would be another load or portentous cliches a la Paolo Cuelo, or as twee as AA Milne's poems (Dorothy Parker verdict: Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up).

How wrong I was. This is an instant classic, a book you will return to over and over, and anyone who can't see that is not reading with their brain. it's a deceptively simple series of incidents on a tiny island over a summer between Grandmother and Granddaughter Sophia. There is a father, a strong presence who never says anything except when it is time to leave. Some strangers intrude from time to time, loud and weird, but the two close ranks against them. Mostly they potter around, while the grandmother gives the best example of parenting I know in literature.

There are many strengths to the book. Firstly, it has that kind of fascination with minutiae which can have you looking into a rock pool for hours. Remember as a kid how on long summer holidays you could lose yourself for days just mooching or making something stupid? (I remember I spent two months tunnelling to Australia when I was eight.) "The Summer Book" really captures that.

It also captures an essential Finno-Swedish quality. Scandinavia is full of grannies like this one - feisty, practical old women full of love but also self-contained. And all Swedes have a wooden hut somewhere miles from anywhere they disappear to for the summer. Read this book and you'll never need to visit the Gulf of Finland.

This is allied to a real feeling for countryside and ecology, written in 1972 way before ecology was fashionable. The descriptions are those of someone who has got down and dirty in the earth, not someone who's seen pretty pictures from their drawing-room window.

And though this is an evocation of childhood tinged with regret and nostalgia, it is not remotely sentimental. In fact it is quite hard. It can encompass storms, shipwrecks and scavenging; a laboriously-built toy village gets washed away in minutes. Childhood terrors are terrifying, and there is a real presence of death. Indeed the whole book ends in death.

The relationship between the generations is subtle, understated and also very funny. We see it from both points of view, changing from paragraph to paragraph. It is never patronising, and the reader isn't patronised either. Tove Janssen seems to be saying, "There may be a moral here for you, but you'll have to work it out for yourself, and anyway you can take it or leave it."

If like me you regard the closing chapter of "The House at Pooh Corner" as one of the high points of literature about childhood, don't hesitate - buy this book.

“The Summer Book” is episodic, detailing events from long summers spent on a remote Island off the coast of Finland, and concentrating on the rapport between the recently motherless six-year old Sophia and her Grandmother. Although short, the book covers a lot of ground – a clear and lucid observation of the natural history of the Island and the surrounding sea, reflections on aging and the end of life and, above all, a sharply drawn portrait of the relationship between young and old.

I didn’t feel the book was particularly well served either by the introduction or by the presentation but that shouldn’t put anyone off.

This excellent book tells its tale shorn of sentimentality and platitude. The prose style (I suppose that’s also a nod in the direction of the translation) is simple and elegant. It left me wanting to tone down my enthusiasm in case I put my friends and relatives off reading it.