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…