Product Description

“Written with such a lightness of touch that it seems miraculous, these stories are a further revelation of Tove Jansson’s heart warming genius.”Ali Smith “As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last.” Philip Pullman 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. The Winter Book features 13 stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults, The Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) plus 7 of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996), translated into English and published here for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6007 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Daily Telegraph, 11 November, 2006
Lightweight, yet cool and clear as a Nordic sea.

Josh Lacey, The Guardian, 18 November, 2006
The book ends perfectly with "Taking leave", a short, melancholy
and very beautiful picture of old age.

About the Author
The writer and artist TOve Jansson (1941-2001) is best known as the creator of the MOOMIN stories, which have been published in thirty-five different languages. THE SUMMER BOOK, also published by Sort Of Books, was one of ten titles that she wrote for adults. A WINTER BOOK: SELECTED STORIES draws from five collections to present the best of Tove Jansson's short fiction, including her own favourite stories.

Customer Reviews

Charming, funny, sympathetic, wise...
I can't resist sharing Body Tonkin's verdict on this wonderful book in The Independent. He devoted his entire column to a review, after first raging about the "snowdrift of Christmas drivel" filling bookshops this winter.
The ideal book for Christmas, he contended, would "honour the experiences and insights of children without sentiment or condescension. It might also salute the changing seasons with a toughly tender eye on wild nature. In doing so, it might even register the passage of time, and the ageing of body and mind, while steering clear of self-pity. And it might (like an unfeasibly flawless companion) contrive to sound charming, funny, sympathetic, wise - and a bit mysterious as well."
"What price would such a paragon command?" Tonkin continued. "£6.99 to be exact. Ideal presents never quite take on tangible form, but A Winter Book comes fairly close...

A book for all seasons...
Tove Jansson's "A Winter Book" cherry-picks short stories from her autobiographical "A Sculptor's Daughter" and adds later gems to deliver an unforgettable collection of work. Her cool, clear gaze takes in vivid moments from childhood (check "The Stone" and the stunning image left by "The Iceberg") through to the unsentimental, yet very poignant, "Taking Leave" which deals with some of the problems of ageing and coming to terms with failing powers.

Tove Jansson was an extraordinary children's writer, and it's great to see some of her work for adults finally translated into English. And what a lovely job Sort Of have done: good, clean cover design, and intelligent use of photographs throughout. Ali Smith's introduction does justice to Jansson's writing. Very few children's authors have the capability to write for adults also. Tove Jansson's honesty, clarity and sense of humour shine throughout.

Wonderful
I got this book after loving The Summer Book so much. I was a little daunted to find that this was not a novel, but a collection of short stories. It is often the case that those who write great novels write mediocre short stories as they are very different disciplines. Luckily Jansson excels at both. The stories are slight, almost like sketches. Some deal with her own memories of bohemian childhood, others are straightforward fiction. The memoir stories are often very funny, with that peculiar melancholy that haunts much of her writing about the moomins. I read some of them to my children and they found them hilarious and touching. The only fault I can find is that these are an amalgamation of stories from several volumes of Jansson's work, which has yet to be published in its entirety in English. I would much rather have read the books as they are meant to be rather than having the stories presented to me by an editor. Having said that, better to have this than nothing at all. I am just hoping they hurry up and print everything she has written.