It’s not worth looking, because if you do everything you’ve imagined disappears. They could go on for many nights of waking up and going to sleep again and being rocked by smoke and the music, and then suddenly a bellow would strike a chill right down to my toes. In Parties – a young girl delights in listening to her father’s parties from her bedroom. We catch some tantalising glimpses of Tove Jansson’s bohemian household – the parents of her child characters here a sculptor and an illustrator like her own, clearly drawn from life. With extraordinary strength and grim determination, she rolls the rock homeward.

Beautifully, depicting the mind and imagination of a child, the collection opens with The Stone – in which a young girl finds what she believes to be an enormous rock of precious metal. Her family part of the Swedish speaking minority in Helsinki. Parts one and two of A Winter Book Snow and Flotsam and Jetsam come originally from The Sculptor’s Daughter, stories inspired by Tove Jansson’s childhood in Helsinki. Touch here, a quiet wisdom and gentle humour – a real joy of a read. Heart-warming and vividly described – Tove Jansson brings the landscapeĪnd people of her childhood and old age to life, though largelyĪutobiographical these pieces are stories not memoir. Type one can read in great greedy gulps – there is a delicious calmness to Jansson’s I love short stories, and these are definitely the

All the people on earth would have to creep.” Soon it would be difficult to walk straight. The trees and houses were no longer upright. Slowly, slowly, the world was turning, heavy with snow. “The very thought of it made me feel giddy. Her affection for Jansson’s storytelling is obvious. Yet, I was assured that I would love Tove Jansson, and I did, though of the two Jansson books I have read to date, A Winter Book is definitely my favourite.Īli Smith writes a wonderful introduction to thisĮdition.

Somehow, I didn’t hear of the Moomins until I was an adult, they completely passed my childhood by.

Tove Jansson is beloved of many because of both her tales for children and her stories for adults. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson came into my life because of my very small book group, it was one I already had had tbr for a long time. Translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff and Kingsley Hart

A winter book by tove jansson