Books published by Sort of Books

Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.

Sort Of books completes the set of Moomin special collectors' edition hardbacks with the most popular title of them all...

Tove Jansson's most personal book and a homage by two artists to the island they loved. In her late-forties, Tove Jansson, helped by a maverick seaman called Brunstrom, raced to build a cabin on an almost barren outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, and for twenty-six summers Tove and her life partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietila, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the solitude and shifting seascapes. Notes from an Island, published in English for the first time, is both a memoir and homage to the island the two women loved intensely and relinquished only when pressed by age. It is also a unique collaboration between two artists. Tove's spare, precise prose - diary entries, vignettes and extracts from Brunstrom's log - frame the subtle washes and aquatints created by Tuulikki. Together they form a work of meditative beauty.

Presents the colour Moomin picture book with its cut-out page designs and playful rhyming text.

Toffle is driven from his home by frightening noises of the forest. Too shy, at first, to approach the many colourful Moomin characters he passes along the way, he gains confidence by discovering a scared and lonely Miffle who needs his help.

The Summer Book 'TOVE JANSSON' WITH A FOREWORD BY ESTHER FREUD An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. This new edition, with a Foreword by Esther Freud, sees the return of a European literary gem - fresh, authentic and deeply humane. New and beautifully presented edition of a Scandinavian literary classic by Finland's most translated author should appeal to all ages dissolving boundaries between fiction, biography and travel.

Driving Over Lemons, a captivating book penned by the talented Chris Stewart, is a must-read for all. Published in 2020 by Sort of Books, this engaging work of art is a stand-out in its genre. Stewart, with his unique storytelling style, transports readers to a different world, making them feel as if they're part of the narrative. Driving Over Lemons is more than just a book; it's an experience that stays with you long after you've turned the last page. Don't miss out on this masterpiece from Sort of Books.

Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.

Essential reading for any lover of the Moomins. This is where it all began. Created in 1945, yet published in this country for the very first time, The Moomins and the Great Flood offers an extraordinary glimpse into the creativity and imagination that launched the Moomin books. Moominmamma and young Moomintroll search for the long lost Moominpappa through forest and flood, meeting a little creature (an early Sniff) and the elegantly strange Tulippa along the way. Tove Jansson illustrates her first ever Moomin adventure with stunning sepia watercolour and delightful pen and ink drawings. A revelation for Moomin fans.

Fair Play: novel by Tove Jansson Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. INTRODUCED BY ALI SMITH "e;So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm - and discreetly radical. Its publication is cause for huge celebration."e; Ali Smith, from her introduction to Fair Play. The writer and artist TOVE JANSSON (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, which have been published in thirty-five languages. However, from 1968, she turned her attention to writing for adults. Fair Play was her last novel, written when she was seventy-five. Sort of Books have also published Tove Jansson's classic The Summer Book (2003) and A Winter Book: Selected Stories (2006), which draws from five collections to present the best of her short fiction. A charming, quietly radical and inspiring book, introduced by Ali Smith. First ever publication in English, in a translation by Thomas Teal.

A rare treat for Moomin Fans with 8 original full colour pages.

Special Collectors' Edition lovingly restored to its original stunning design.

"e;A sorceress of the essay form."e; John Berger Five years after Findings broke the mould of nature writing, Kathleen Jamie subtly shifts our focus on landscape and the living world, daring us to look again at the 'natural', the remote and the human-made. She offers us the closest of perspectives and the most distant, too: from vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, or the pores of a whale's jawbone under restoration, to satellites rising over a Scottish island, or the aurora borealis lighting up an iceberg-strewn sea. We encounter killer whales circling below cliffs, noisy colonies of breeding gannets, and paintings deep in caves. Written with precision, delicacy and personal recollection, Sightlines invites us to pause and look afresh at our surroundings.

Assembles the cream of Levi and Cat's adventures in a 160pp hardback - produced, with flat-bound, mirrored cover boards and colour printing throughout.

ENCIRCLING: Book 1 of the Encircling TrilogyWinner English PEN AwardWinner European Prize for LiteratureNominated for Nordic Council's PrizeA novel of contemporary Norwegian life that stands alongside Knausgaard's chronicles.David has lost his memory. A newspaper advert appears asking friends and relatives to share their memories of him. Three respond: his two closest teenage friends, and his stepfather, now estranged, from his backwater hometown of Namsos. Their reminiscences of teenage nihilism and rebellion, the eroticism and uncertainties of first love, and intense experiments in art and music, are framed by present day scenes of lives run aground on thwarted ambition and intimacy. Told in letters, interleaved with internal monologues and commentaries, Encircling provides a dark, searingly honest portrait of life at the edges of provincial Norway. Yet for all its apparent bleakness, Tiller's remarkable opening novel of the Encircling Trilogy pulses with humanity and truth. As each narrative colours and reshapes the last, the enigma that is David continues to intrigue us."e;Drills into human nature with sensibility, painful honesty and accurate prose. A rare talent."e;---Jo Nesbo

If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture.The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

The epic of Island Life that has gripped Finland Winner of the Finlandia Prize Nominated for the Nordic Criti Prize It is the summer of 1946. A novice Lutheran priest, his wife and baby daughter arrive at a windswept island off the coast of Finland, where they are welcomed by its frugal, self-sufficient community of fisher folk turned reluctant farmers. In this deeply atmospheric and quietly epic tale, Lundberg uses a wealth of everyday detail to draw us irresistibly into a life and mindset far removed from our own - stoic and devout yet touched with humour and a propensity for song. With each season, the young family's love of the island and its disparate and scattered inhabitants deepens, and when the winter brings ice new and precarious links appear. Told in spare, simple prose that mirrors the islanders' unadorned style, this is a story as immersive as it is heartrending.

'Tension, thy name is Sophie Hannah' Independent 'Sophie Hannah just gets better and better. Her plots are brilliantly cunning and entirely unpredictable.' The Guardian 'Intelligent, classy and with a wonderfully gothic imagination' The Times In this small but perfectly formed collection of supernatural short stories, bestselling author, Sophie Hannah, takes the comforting scenes of everyday life and imbues them with a frisson of fear. Why is a young woman so unnerved by the presence of a visitors book in her boyfriend's inner-city home? And whose spidery handwriting is it that fills the pages? Who is the strangely courteous boy still lingering at a child's tenth birthday party when all the parents have gathered their children and left? And why does the presence of a perfectly ordinary woman in a post office queue leave another customer pallid and quaking with fear?

Tove Jansson's first book for adults was a memoir, capturing afresh the enchantments and fears of her Helsinki childhood. Restored to its original form, Sculptor's Daughter gives us a glimpse of the mysteries of winter ice, the bonhomie of balalaika parties, and the vastness of Christmas viewed from beneath the tree.

It's two decades since Chris Stewart moved to his farm on the wrong side of a river in the mountains of southern Spain and his daughter Chloe is preparing to fly the nest for university. In this latest, typically hilarious dispatch from El Valero, we find Chris, now something of a local literary celebrity, using that fame to help out his old sheep-shearing partner; cooking a TV lunch for visiting British chef, Rick Stein; and discovering the pitfalls of Spanish public speaking. Yet it's at El Valero, his beloved sheep farm, that Chris is most in his element as he, his wife Ana and their assorted dogs, cats and sheep weather a near calamitous flood and emerge as newly certified organic farmers. His cash crop? The lemons and oranges he once so blithely drove over, of course.

The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio - as in the wider art world - he has his enemies, and his niece - just arrived from England - is no great admirer either. At the same time a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist. But the life and art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of Nostalgia, a novel that teems with incidents and characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic and the intimate, between the past and the present, Nostalgia is as intricately structured as a symphony, interweaving the narratives of history, legend, architecture - and much more - in a kaleidoscope of facts and invention.

A fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel: 'Lord of the Flies' meets 'The Beach'Bored of the 'mango smoothie' trail and keen to spice up their Facebook albums, and maybe their sex lives, Jake and Will take a tour into China's jungle borderland with Burma. Their guide, however, has his own agenda and gradually the two gap-year students slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder and moral decay, their chance of survival determined by a game of hide and seek played out with deadly crossbows.

Daniel Brennan, approaching the premature end of his life, retreats to a room in his brother's suburban house. To divert himself and to entertain Ellen, his carer, he writes the journal that is Telescope, blurring truth, gossip and fiction in vignettes of his own life and the lives of those close to him. Above all he focuses on his siblings: mercurial Celia, whose life as a teacher in Italy seems to have run aground, and kindly Charlie, the entrepreneur of the family. Enriched with remarkable observations on topics ranging from tattoos and Tokyo street fashion to early French photography, Telescope is a startlingly original and moving book, a glimpse of the world as seen by a connoisseur of vicarious experience. Jonathan Buckley's first five novels were published by Fourth Estate; his sixth by Sort of Books: The Biography of Thomas Lang (1997) Xerxes (1999) Ghost MacIndoe (2001) Invisible (2004) So He Takes the Dog (2006) Contact (2010)