Humor

The Summer Book by Töve Jansson is on its way to our shelves. This is a new-to-us old novel: a Scandinavian classic about a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter summering on a tiny island in the Finnish Archipelago, a cluster of more than 40,000 islands in the Baltic Sea. In short, flawlessly distilled chapters that feel complete in themselves—a bit like independent stories—events take place: the beach is combed, flora is observed, and, on a particularly marshy patch of shoreline, the city of Venice is constructed; worms are cut in half with a spade and a book is written about them