High Summer, Low Tides #ToveTrove

I share my musings on The Summer Book – Tove Jansson’s classic novel, which offers a perceptive portrait of companionship, imagination and change across a single summer

“It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened.”
– Tove Jansson, The Summer Book 

First published in Swedish in 1972 as Sommerboken, The Summer Book remains one of Tove Jansson’s most cherished works: an unsentimental yet moving novel in which a grandmother and her granddaughter spend a season on a remote Finnish island, creating their own small universe through art and resourcefulness. What begins as a series of simple vignettes deepens into a reflection on love, loss and the consolations of nature – written in prose so clear it feels like sunlight on water.

Beneath its simplicity, though, the book is a study in companionship and the way love flows between the generations. Jansson captures the grandmother’s determind, independent personality and humour, and her granddaughter Sophia’s impulsive curiosity and insecurities with a tenderness that moves and amuses without ever losing its subtle restraint. In the spaces between their conversations, the island becomes a kind of emotional barometer, holding both a buried pain of loss and the consoling rhythm of their time spent together.

In her foreword, Esther Freud comments that at the start of the book, “six‑year‑old Sophia wakes in the night and remembers she has a bed to herself because her mother is dead. Grandmother is nearby, and although old, her legs weak, her head dizzy, she is lively with wisdom and imagination. She is [the child’s] companion through the months ahead.” Freud’s observations resonate all the more when one realises these characters grew out of Jansson’s own family¹: Sophia is based on her niece of the same name, who really did lose her mother at a young age, and the grandmother draws tenderly on Jansson’s beloved mother, Signe. The novel’s intimacy, then, is not merely imagined but shaped by lived experience – a distillation of grief, resilience and the sustaining companionship that carries them through that summer. 

Although the story centres on Sophia and her grandmother, they are not alone on the island. The girl’s father (based on Jansson’s brother, Lars) is there too, his steady, practical presence always nearby without ever intruding on the book’s more muted emotional currents.

Jansson’s affinity with the Finnish archipelago runs through every page. Before she and her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, began spending summers on their own island, she passed many childhood holidays on Bredskär², absorbing the sea’s moods and the freedoms of life lived close to the elements. Those early seasons, and her first years on Klovharun³ in the early 1970s, lend The Summer Book its sense of familiarity. The landscape is never a mere backdrop but an inherited sensibility, and in Sophia and her grandmother’s explorations we feel the imprint of author’s own experiences worked into the narrative.

“All good art is life, and everything that is an expression of what is living and real must make the world a better place.”
– Tove Jansson’s acceptance speech for the Mårbacka Prize (1972)

The novel unfolds in a succession of brief chapters, each one capturing a moment. The form is spare but expansive, allowing small incidents to resonante, and the rhythm of the book mirrors the rhythm of summer days: unhurried and edged with gradual changes in the natural environment. Through these fragments, Sophia and her grandmother move in and out of each other’s company with ease, their conversations, silences and occasional disagreements forming the book’s core. What emerges is a portrait of camaraderie shaped by inquisitiveness and pragmatism, mingled with the customary negotiations necessary for living so closely together – all rendered with Tove’s characteristic precision.

Scattered through the book are moments that linger in the mind for their resultant charm: small escapades that arise from mischief or the often‑confusing business of navigating life. A sudden burst of determination, an unexpected experiment, a minor territorial dispute – each incident revealing something of Sophia’s often comical, trusting naïvety and her grandmother’s dry, unflappable wit. There are scenes that catch you off guard with their absurdity – a spontaneous song about cowpats, the arrival of an ill‑matched child visitor, a patch of ground transformed into a “magic forest” – and others that carry a sharper edge, hinting at the old woman’s frustration when decisions are made around her rather than with her. Together, these incidents add a lively thread to the book, offsetting its more reflective passages and reminding us how rapidly delight can turn to sadness.

“Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back.”
– Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

What remains for me after reading this book for the umpteenth time is not a single event but the atmosphere of the island itself – a place where imagination, irritation and deep affection coexist without unnecessary faff. Jansson captures the texture of everyday life with such clarity that the smallest exchanges feel significant, and the book’s blend of wit and poignancy leaves a lasting impression. In the end, The Summer Book offers no grand revelations, merely a recognition that life’s brightest and most difficult moments often sit side by side, shaped by those with whom we live and the places we know best. 

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My copy of The Summer Book is a softback edition published by Sort of Books in 2003 and translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal⁴. The iconic front cover, showing a photograph of Tove and Lars Jansson’s island house, was taken by their brother Per Olov Jansson. The picture of Signe Hammarsten and Sophia Jansson sitting together is by Margareta Strömstedt, and the author portrait is by Alf Lidman. The volume also includes a 2003 Foreword by the British novelist Esther Freud⁵.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9^th August 1914, the daughter of a Swedish-Finnish father who worked as a sculptor and a Swedish-born mother who was a graphic designer. She first trained as an artist and made a name for herself in her homeland as a painter and cartoonist. She became internationally famous after creating the Moomin books. She later went on to write novels and short fiction for adults. She worked in her Helsinki studio, moving to a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. She died on 27^th June 2001 at the age of eighty-six.

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“Grandmother had always liked [the] great change in August, most of all perhaps because of the way it never varied: a place for everything and everything in its place. Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear and […] for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flowerbeds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their levelling and rinsing […]. In the woods were a few enormous white roses that blossomed and lived for one day in breathless splendour.”

–  Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

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NOTES

1. Signe Hammarsten Jansson died in 1970 at the age of 88. “In The Summer Book she brought her mother back to life again, as a grandmother on an island together with her son Lasse’s little daughter.” Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin (translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella), Chapter 15: ‘Dreaming of a Valley’, p. 421.
2. Bredskär is located in the Pellinge (Pellinki) archipelago, Porvoo, Finland. Coordinates: 60.18192° N, 25.77470° E.
3. Klovharun is a small outer islet of the Pellinge archipelago, Porvoo, Finland. Coordinates: 60.16533° N, 25.80274° E.
4. Thomas Teal translated Sommerboken into English in 1974.
5. The latest reprint of The Summer Book, issued to coincide with a major film adaption, includes an afterword by Sophia who returned to the island during the COVID-19 pandemic at the point of becoming a grandmother herself.

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Images of Tove Jansson © Moomin Characters™