The Summer Book (Swedish: Sommarboken) is a novel written by the Finland-Swedish author Tove Jansson in 1972.

In Smith's view, The Summer Book is an astonishing achievement of artistry, "the writing so lightly kept, so simple-seeming, so closely concerned with the weighing of moments that any extra weight of exegesis is too much.

Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.

"[3] The New York Review of Books writes that Jansson's characters, the girl and her grandmother, "discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love.

"[4] The novelist Philip Pullman described the book as "a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny.