Book excerpt: '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.