The Summer Book
Invite your patrons to experience The Summer Book, a moving adaptation of Tove Jansson’s beloved novel that beautifully captures themes of family, grief, and the quiet wisdom found in nature. Directed by Charlie McDowell and starring Glenn Close, the film follows the evolving relationship between nine-year-old Sophia and her grandmother over the course of one transformative summer.
Music Box Films has partnered with Kanopy for the North American release of The Summer Book, marking Kanopy’s first collaboration on a narrative feature film. Following its theatrical debut, the film will be available exclusively to public libraries through Kanopy, allowing your patron to access this poignant story through your digital offerings.
This adaptation offers rich opportunities for programming and discussion across multiple audiences. Libraries can host book-to-film events, intergenerational discussion groups, or film club screenings exploring Tove Jansson’s literary and artistic legacy. Her impact extends well beyond The Summer Book as the creator of the globally beloved Moomins, now the subject of the first-ever U.S. exhibition dedicated to her work.
Programming Ideas
- Host a book club with the novel, available on Libby. Host a discussion group afterwards and screen the film
- Encourage grandmother and granddaughter events at your library!
- Discussion groups, or film club screenings exploring Tove Jansson’s literary and artistic legacy.
- Promote the title on your library’s social media accounts. Right click and save the images below and share them on social media
What to Read After Reading and Watching The Summer Book
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
“In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.”
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Buy the Prodigal Summer audiobook
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer’s wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. A pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the countryside, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.
The Book of Ebenezer le Page by G.B Edwards
Buy The Book of Ebenezer le Page ebook
“Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated, and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late twentieth century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.
B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.”
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman
Buy the My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry ebook
Buy the My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry audiobook
“Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. She is also Elsa’s best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.
When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is told with the same comic accuracy and beating heart as Fredrik Backman’s bestselling debut novel, A Man Called Ove. It is a story about life and death and one of the most important human rights: the right to be different.”
Don’t Forget about our Kanopy End of Year Sale
Looking to upgrade your Kanopy catalog? Now is the perfect time to expand your Kanopy offerings, while saving up to 30%. Learn More