{"product_id":"the-summer-book-movie-tiein-edition-isbn-9798896230595","title":"The Summer Book (Movie Tie-In Edition)","description":"\u003cb\u003eNow a major motion picture starring Glenn Close and directed by Charlie McDowell\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.“This slim, magical, life-affirming novel tells the story of a young girl and her grandmother, who spend their summer together on a small, isolated island in the Gulf of Finland. Absent of sentimentality, full of love and humor and wisdom, this is a tale about how much fun two people can have in the middle of nowhere, when they are practicing social isolation in earnest.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“I loved it and it's a perfect read for a summer which will, I think, be memorable for many of us as a kind of shadow season, a time carved out from normal life and defined by the absence of normality.” —Eve Tushnet, \u003ci\u003ePatheos\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It's deceptively simple, refreshingly unembellished, distilled, grounded in sensory experience, and absolutely direct. It's comforting for precisely the same reasons it's unsettling, like standing on the shore looking across a dark sea at a horizon you swear you could almost touch.\" —\u003ci\u003eRain Taxi\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Poetic understatement, dry humor and a deep love for nature are obvious throughout her oeuvre. . . . The book is as lovely, as evocative as a film by Hayao Miyazaki.\" —\u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Jansson's clear prose—capable of sentiment without being sentimental—contains multitudes. \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e is bright but dense; it is slim enough to read in a day but holds a whole world between its covers.” —Powell’s Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Tove Jansson was a genius. This is a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny.” —Philip Pullman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A wise, joyous book . . . it unfolds the knowledge and the beauty of the two lives it embraces–old wisdom and young discover, intertwining like vines.” —Rex Reed\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort . . . [it] says so much that we want to hear in such an accessible form, without ever really saying anything at all.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Few books since \u003ci\u003eRobinson Crusoe\u003c\/i\u003e have evoked the joys of island living so powerfully as this Finnish novella.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e, \"Paperback of the Week\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e is a marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom.\" —\u003ci\u003eDaily Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A marvellous book . . . The prose is sublime: plain, but not oppressively so.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A . . . beautiful novel which blends humour and poetry with detailed observation of tiny things.\" —\u003ci\u003eDaily Mail\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"It's hard to describe the astonishing achievement of Jansson's artistry . . . a perfection of the small, quiet read.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e, \"Book of the Week\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A wonderful novel to devour in the sunshine . . . full of charm and character.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e, \"50 Best Books for Summer\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Every so often, a book is published that captures something in us . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book \u003c\/i\u003eis one of those.\" —\u003ci\u003eDaily Telegraph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Responses, conversations, and observations yield quietly reflective and funny ruminations on life and death.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Age\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson’s twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.” —Ali Smith\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a wonderful, life-affirming, spirited book. Reading it was a tonic.” —Chris Stewart\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eccentric, funny, wise, full of joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.” —Esther Freud\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e is beautiful and warm, with the kind of wisdom we can adapt to our everyday lives.\" —Liv Ullmann\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Take a book in which there is no plot but bucketloads of positive feelings presented simply, and it will become a cult. \u003ci\u003eZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eJonathan Livingston Seagull \u003c\/i\u003ewere both bestsellers; no one could say what either was really about, but everyone could quote a meaningful truism from them. \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book \u003c\/i\u003eis in this mould: it manages to make you feel good as well as wise.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book \u003c\/i\u003eis pure loveliness. The movements of tides and winds and boats and insects loom larger for our narrator than the currents of history, and the profound quiet of the setting—I’m reminded of Akhil Sharma’s description of a prose like 'white light'—allows us to hear Jansson’s unsparing and ironic tenderness, a tone that remains purely her own, even in translation.\"\u003cbr\u003e—Garth Risk Hallberg, \u003ci\u003eThe Millions \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eTove Jansson\u003c\/b\u003e (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the family’s art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman’s cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books as a child, and set out from an early age to be an artist; her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. After attending art schools in both Stockholm and Paris, she returned to Helsinki, where in 1940s and ’50s she won acclaim for her paintings and murals. From 1929 until 1953 Jansson drew humorous illustrations and political cartoons for the left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine \u003ci\u003eGarm\u003c\/i\u003e, and it was there that what was to become Jansson’s most famous creation, Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition, made his first appearance. Jansson went on to write about the adventures of Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their curious friends in a long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, of which \u003ci\u003eSculptor’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSun City\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Winter Book\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eFair Play\u003c\/i\u003e have been translated into English. In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy. Tove Jansson and her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, continued to live part-time in a cottage on the remote outer edge of the Finnish archipelago until 1991. \u003cb\u003eKathryn Davis\u003c\/b\u003e has received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of many novels, including \u003ci\u003eLabrador\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Girl Who Trod on a Loaf\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHell\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Walking Tour\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Thin Place\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eVersailles\u003c\/i\u003e. In 2006 she received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233750331621,"sku":"NP9798896230595","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9798896230595.jpg?v=1767741720","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-summer-book-movie-tiein-edition-isbn-9798896230595","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}