Books like The Summer Book
A six-year-old girl and her elderly grandmother spend a summer exploring a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, in vignettes about grief and companionship.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Summer Book
The True Deceiver
In a snowbound coastal village, a calculating young woman sets out to win the trust and money of a reclusive children's book illustrator, and each woman ends up changing the other.
People in the Summer Night
Over one summer night in the Finnish countryside, a birth, a death and a few chance meetings pass among the people of a village.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
A woman develops a tender relationship with her former high school teacher over sake and seasonal food.
Sweet Bean Paste
Sentaro, an ex-convict working off a debt at a Tokyo dorayaki stall, reluctantly hires Tokue, a woman in her seventies with misshapen hands, and her homemade bean paste starts drawing customers to his counter.
Out Stealing Horses
A sixty-seven-year-old widower moves to a remote cabin in eastern Norway and meets a neighbour who pulls him back to the summer of 1948, when he lost his best friend and his father.
Wanderers
An ageing writer takes to the road as a labourer in rural Norway, working on farms and estates, and falls under the spell of a captain's wife at one of them.
A Man Called Ove
A curmudgeonly old widower whose only joy is enforcing neighbourhood rules is slowly redeemed by the immigrant family that moves in next door.
Foster
A girl from a large, struggling family is sent to live with relatives on a farm in rural Ireland for a summer, and the quiet kindness she finds there changes her, in a single, devastating novella.
Skylark
An ageing provincial couple send their plain daughter to relatives for a week and discover, in her absence, a life they had hidden even from themselves.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
When her boyfriend tells her he is marrying someone else, Takako quits her job and moves into the dusty room above her uncle Satoru's secondhand bookshop in Tokyo's Jimbocho book district, a place she has never cared about.
Morning and Evening
The birth of Johannes, a fisherman's son on the Norwegian coast, and, many years later, a day near the end of his life.
The Details
A bedridden woman with a fever recalls four people who shaped her life, turning each encounter over in compact, precise portraits.