Description

‘Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light.’
Ali Smith

Following the widely acclaimed and bestselling The Summer Book, here is A Winter Book collection of some of Tove Jansson’s best loved and most famous stories. Drawn from youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer’s prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It has been selected and is introduced by Ali Smith.

A Winter Book features 13 stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults, The Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) plus seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996), translated into English and published here for the first time.

Publisher Review

A predicted major seller ... I feel it will probably do better even than The Summer Book -- Sarah Broadhurst * The Bookseller * Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light. -- Ali Smith These stories show a side of (Tove Jansson) that may be new to some British readers, who perhaps think of her, if at all, as a writer of charming stories for children. They are as tough as good rope, these stories, as smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air and wind as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have them collected at last. -- Philip Pullman These stories are infused with such a strong sense of Tove Jansson's character that by the last page you feel on almost intimate terms with her. Determined, indignant, fearless as a child, we see how she develops - have the luxury of glimpsing her as an old lady too, still determined, still indignant. -- Esther Freud Meeting the real Tove in these stories has been a an exciting and unnerving experience - a bit like meeting my own guardian angel. -- Frank Cottrell Boyce