When he skipped across the meadow by the beach, his progress was like a stroke of wind through the grass.” Sophia loves him, carries him around, but the cat walks away, breaking her heart. “He was the same colour as the island – a light yellowish grey with striped shadings like granite, or like sunlight on a sand bottom. In one chapter Sophia gets a cat, Moppy, who ignores her. There are no lessons, but there is always insight. It’s a short book, each chapter a perfect short story featuring the relationship of the grandmother and the girl. Sometimes the grandmother plays along and sometimes she doesn’t. They’ve both got tempers they’re judgemental and moody the grandmother is frail, cantankerous and sleeps a lot and Sophia can be stroppy. Sophia’s father fishes and works (unexplained) and the girl and her grandmother hang out together. The island barely rises above the sea there is a rocky shoreline, some trees. It is one of thousands in the Gulf of Finland, home to just the one summer house, and they leave in winter when it is snow covered. It’s the story of a six year old girl, her father and grandmother on their summer island. I was enraptured by Moominland as a child and transported by this book.

Philip Pullman on the book cover of The Summer Book declares “Tove Jansson was a genius.” I agree.

Jansson was an interesting woman, fiercely intelligent and independent – recognised as a literary icon with her strange and enchanting characters and gentle storytelling. Tove Jansson is both the illustrator and the writer. They’re classic stories of a family and their friends, all different, all needing love in different ways. If you didn’t grow up with Moomintroll, Snufkin, Little My, the Hattifatteners and that lot, nothing wrong with growing up a bit more now. Gifts tell you a lot about the people who give them. Her husband sent me an Atlas of Remote Islands and put a gnome in the garden (the gnome disappeared, but there’s been no postcard).

Last time she came to stay she brought Moomin coffee mugs.

The summer book tove jansson summary