Sort of Books – serie

Meet Chris Stewart, the eternal optimist. A man who flies to Spain, sees a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river and, with scarcely a second thought, hands over a cash deposit. And then finds he has acquired not just the farm, but the farmer, too, who has no intention of leaving. Not to mention the lack of running water, electricity or even a bridge.It would be enough to send most people straight back home. But Chris and his wife Ana are made of stronger stuff - and besides, they have sunk all their savings into their farm, El Valero, and buying a flock of sheep. So there is no turning back. Life gets tough, but it also gets good.Driving Over Lemons is that rare thing - a funny, insightful book that charms you from the first sun-lit page to the last. And one that makes running an Andalucian mountain farm seem like a half-decent career move. It has been a major bestseller both in Britain and Spain.

In the run-up to Moomins eightieth anniversary (2025) the spotlight is on The Moomins and The Great Flood and the first glimpse it offers of Moomin Valley. Tove Jansson wrote this first ever Moomin story in 1945, in the wake of World War II, and although a children's tale, it vividly evokes the displacement of refugees throughout Europe at the time. A global Moomin.com campaign will celebrate the eighty years of the Moomins with the slogan 'the door is always open', emphasising Jansson's timely message of kindness and inclusiveness towards those forced to flee to safety.This new format edition includes an introduction by much loved author Frank Cottrell- Boyce; an afterword of newly discovered notes that Tove made about her Moomin characters; plus a fabulous cut-out Moominhouse poster designed by Tove.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING GLENN CLOSETove Jansson's classic, bestselling novel'Distils the essence of summer' Robert Macfarlane'Magical, life-affirming' Elizabeth Gilbert The Worldwide Classic about a tiny island and larger love.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. With a foreword by Esther Freud and an afterword by Sophia Jansson (on whom the child 'Sophia' is based) who returns to the island during the pandemic at the point of becoming a grandmother herself.Includes a 15pp epilogue by Tove's niece Sophia Jansson - the inspiration for 'Sophia' - on a personal and moving return to the island.'Eccentric, funny, wise, full of joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.' Esther Freud'Tove Jansson was a genius. This is a marvellous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny.' Philip Pullman

A tale of Moomin Valley sees Toffle driven from his home by the 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. Toffle's quest to save Miffle from the dreadful Groke is an inspiring tale that every child (and many adults) are sure to identify with. In Scandinavia, this story by Tove Jansson is even more popular than her Moomin books; in over 40 years since it was published it has never once been out of print.

Tove Jansson's first book for adults drew on her childhood memories to capture afresh the enchantments and fears of growing up in Helsinki in the nineteen tens and twenties. Described as both a memoir and 'a book of superb stories' by Ali Smith, her startlingly evocative prose offers a glimpse of the mysteries of winter ice, the bonhomie of balalaika parties, and the vastness of Christmas viewed from beneath the tree. With rare images from the Jansson family archive, it makes a perfect gift.

Tove's definitive (1968) edition lovingly restored to original designsCelebrating 80 years of Comet in Moominland with the first English translation of Tove's revised text. This is the version known and loved in the rest of the world.'I love these editions - so beautifully produced, so solid and permanent, just as Tove Jansson deserved' Philip PullmanA beautiful collectors' edition using original cover artwork, newly scanned images and gorgeous endpapers.Comet in Moominland, the first full-length Moomin novel, was published 80 years ago. Tove revised the story a decade later and again in 1968, reframing adventures (and adding new characters). Now for the first time this edition can be read in English, in a brand new translation.Tove Jansson's story of a mysterious, threatening comet, and the journey of discovery by Moomin and his friend Sniff across the Lonely Mountains, has captivated generations of readers across the world. The story introduced much-loved Moomin characters, including free-spirited Snufkin, the philosophical Muskrat, the intuitive Snorkmaiden, obsessional Hemulens and strange Hattifatteners.Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, Comet in Moominland reminds us to be brave, welcoming to outsiders, and nurture hope, even when calamity threatens.

A Fabulous Find from the Moomin ArchivesA classic Moomin Book with COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONSAnd a beautiful FOLD-OUT PANORAMAIn 1961, at the request of her Italian publishers, Tove Jansson created a unique new edition of Moominland Midwinter, the tale in which Moomin wakes from hibernation to contend alone with the mysterious world of winter. The text and internal line drawings of this much loved story were unchanged, but Tove added a beautiful new cover illustration and seven glorious full-page colour illustrations. This was the only Moomin title that she illustrated in colour and it has long been a prized item for collectors. For the first time, it is available in English.For this new Sort Of edition, Tove's nephew James Zambra restored the original cover and colour illustrations, along with a glorious fold-out panorama of characters from the book, which Tove Jansson painted for the first French edition. Sort Of Books have also added a back cover designed for the first Swedish edition of Moominland Midwinter, an image used on the first Puffin book, and a playful bookplate 'wreath' from the first German book. We believe this is the most beautiful Moomin book ever published!

In the summer of 1947, a young priest, Petter, his wife and baby daughter, arrive by mail boat at a tiny island. They are to take over its drafty homestead from where Petter is to minister to the scattered community. In this evocative tale, Ulla-Lena Lundberg draws us into the minutiae of an austere yet purposeful life where the demands of self-sufficiency - cows to milk and sheep to graze - are tempered by the kindness of neighbours. With each season, the family's love of the island grows and when the winter brings ice a new and tentative link is created. Told through the eyes of Petter, the wholehearted if naive novice priest, and Mona, his tough-minded wife, a story unfolds that is as immersive as it is heartrending.Winner of the Finlandia prize and nominated for the Nordic Critics Prize, Ice was a huge bestseller in Finland.

'Good writers offer advice. Great writers offer condolences' If you want to be a writer, then you'd better be ready to hurl yourself at the door. That's the message from Stephen Marche in this irresistibly droll broadside. Perseverance, in the teeth of rejection, forms the essence of a writer's life. It's what it takes, so no whining. Even the greatest of writers grapple with failure. Marche's provocative, often very funny vignettes range through literary history from Samuel Johnson ('broke as f*ck') to Jane Austen's lacklustre publishing deals, to Dostoevsky facing mock-execution. The trick is to endure. As James Baldwin famously exhorts us: 'Write. Find a way to keep alive and write.'For new and seasoned writers, Marche's words are salutary and, in a paradoxical way, consoling.All writers are up against it. Success is just an attire.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 SALTIRE AWARDIn keeping with the concept of Cairn the 2025 reprint contains an added 'stone' - the much loved poem What the Clyde said after Cop 26'This marvel of a book is a profound meditation on the precariousness of the planet ... these pieces kept bringing tears to my eyes, catching me offguard ... it is what art or, in this case, wonderful writing can do'Kate Kellaway, ObserverCairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape. The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.

Join Christopher Nye on his hilarious journey to become the self-styled Rocco Forte of the Road to Eastbourne...This is a book about a dream. The dream of running a restaurant. In Uckfield, East Sussex.Well, okay, Uckfield didn't actually appear in the dream. But for Christopher Nye it was the perfect choice: a small town, but not too small; a town crying out for an American-style diner; a town without a McDonald's.So here's the story of how to make it big in small-town Britain. How to find the right premises (if not quite the right location); how to motivate teenage staff while giving work experience to a haute cuisine chef; how to stay out of casualty when things get a bit 'Goodfellas' on a Friday night; how to keep your puppy hidden from the Environmental Health Inspector; and why you should never, ever, hire an Elvis impersonator on the cheap. Oh - and how to deal with McDonald's, when they realise they need an outlet in Uckfield after all.Maximum Diner is a tale of all this, served up with the crispiest fries and the strangest milkshakes on the south coast. Read it and laugh aloud. But keep that dream alive. For this might all happen to you.

It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary writer.Whether she is following the call of a peregrine in the hills above her home in Fife, sailing into a dark winter solstice on the Orkney islands, or pacing around the carcass of a whale on a rain-swept Hebridean beach, she creates a subtle and modern narrative, peculiarly alive to her connections and surroundings.

MEN & DOGS and WOMEN & DOGS are a stunning pair of books. Each contains 80 images of people and their dogs, from Maria Callas to Robbie Williams, Churchill to Jilly Cooper. They are an amazing collection of photos, covering a century of dogs and their owners. But they are far more than picture books, with fascinating text, full of compelling anecdotes, and dog lore, which show people in a fascinating new light -through the story of their relationships with their pets.

'Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light.'Ali SmithFollowing 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.

"So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm - and discreetly radical. Its publication is cause for huge celebration."(Ali Smith, from her Introduction to Fair Play)What mattered most to Tove Jansson, she explained in her eighties, was work and love, a sentiment she echoes in this tender and original novel. Translated for the first time into English, Fair Play portrays a love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side-by-side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other's creativity we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.

Everybody has their secrets, and in Sophie Hannah's fantastic stories the curtains positively twitch with them. Who, for instance, is the hooded figure hiding in the bushes outside a young man's house? Why does the same stranger keep appearing in the background of a family's holiday photographs? What makes a woman stand mesmerised by two children in a school playground, children she's never met but whose names she knows well? And which secret results in a former literary festival director sorting soiled laundry in a shabby hotel? All will be revealed...but at a cost. As Sophie Hannah uncovers the dark obsessions and strange longings behind the most ordinary relationships, life will never seem quite the same again.

In the deep winter snows of a Swedish hamlet, a strange young woman fakes a break-in at the house of an elderly artist in order to persuade her that she needs companionship. But what does she hope to gain by doing this? And who ultimately is deceiving whom? In this portrayal of two women grappling with truth and lies, nothing can be taken for granted. By the time the snow thaws, both their lives will have changed irrevocably.

This newly translated collection of stories brilliantly evokes the shifting scenes and restlessness of summer. A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish Island is thrown into disarray when a disconcerting young boy arrives; an artist returns to an old flat to discover that her life has been eerily usurped.Philosophical and profound, but with the deceptive lightness that is her hallmark, Travelling Light is guaranteed to surprise and transport.

A little girl is transported with the help of magic glasses from the tedium of a summer afternoon into an exciting world of mangrove swamps, spluttering volcanoes and sea where birds fly upside down and wild things threaten to pounce. But she is not alone. Old friends from Moomin Valley - Hemulen, Sniff, Snufkin, Thingummy & Bob - have joined her on the journey, and Moomin too, who rides to their rescue in a stripey balloon.This brand new version of a 'lost classic' pairs Jansson's irresistible artwork with a playful rhyming text by one of Britain's star poets.

If you're wondering what Chris Stewart did before he and Ana moved to El Valero, their Spanish farm, here's one of the answers. He took to the sea, landing a job as skipper for the summer, sailing a Cornish Crabber around the Greek islands. It was his dream job - and there was just one tiny problem. He hadn't ever sailed before and had not the foggiest how to start.In a series of madcap and hilarious adventures we follow Chris from a shaky start in Chichester harbour to his epic Odyssey to Spetses (a bucket would have been handy), and then on to the journey of a lifetime - battening down the hatches on a trip across the North Atlantic. It's a journey crackling with Chris's zest for life, irresistible humour, and unerring lack of foresight. Dry land never looked more welcoming.

Dominic Pattison's life is one of level contentment: his marriage has proved happy and durable; his business, too, is successful.And then Sam Williams, a builder and ex-squaddie, enters his life. Sam claims to be his son.Yet is Sam who he says he is? After almost thirty years, Dominic can remember little of the affair with Sam's mother. His instinct is to recoil from this aggressive and volatile stranger, who could, with just a few words, take his life apart. But Sam refuses to be dismissed.With its deft switches of sympathy between menaced 'father' and rebuffed 'son' and its exploration of the intricacies of memory, Contact will resonate long with its readers.

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 anecdotes and 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 through the eyes of a connoisseur of vicarious experience.

Bored of the 'mango smoothie' trail and keen to spice up their Facebook albums, and perhaps also 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.A fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel: Deliverance meets Lord of the Flies.

The outer world flew open like a door, and I wondered - what is it that we're just not seeing?In this greatly anticipated sequel to Findings, prize-winning poet and renowned nature writer Kathleen Jamie takes a fresh look at her native Scottish landscapes, before sailing north into iceberg-strewn seas. Her gaze swoops vertiginously too; from a countryside of cells beneath a hospital microscope, to killer whales rounding a headland, to the constellations of satellites that belie our sense of the remote. Written with her hallmark precision and delicacy, and marked by moments in her own life, Sightlines offers a rare invitation to pause and to pay heed to our surroundings.

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.

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 Chlöe is preparing to fly the nest for university. In this latest, typically hilarious dispatch from El Valero we find Chris, now a local literary celebrity, using his fame to help his old sheep-shearing partner find work on a raucous road trip; cooking a TV lunch for visiting British chef, Rick Stein; discovering the pitfalls of Spanish public speaking; and recalling his own first foray into the adult world of work.Yet it's at El Valero, his beloved sheep farm, that Chris remains 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 Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomin stories, written between 1945 and 1970 and still in print in more than twenty languages. However, the Moomins were only a part of her prodigious output. Already admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, cartoonist and illustrator, she would go on to write a series of classic novels and short stories. She remains Scandinavia's best loved author.Tove Jansson's work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family (and special bond with her mother), of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. Love and work was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising. If her relationships with men foundered on her ambivalence towards marriage, those with women came as a revelation, especially the love and companionship she found with her long-time partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she lived on the solitary island of Klovharu.In this meticulously researched, authorised biography, Boel Westin draws together the many threads of Jansson's life: from the studies interrupted to help her family; the dark shades of war and her emergence as an artist with a studio of her own; to the years of Moomin-mania, and later novel writing. Based on numerous conversations with Tove, and unprecedented access to her journals, letters and personal archives, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers a rare and privileged insight into the world of a writer whom Philip Pullman described, simply, as 'a genius'.

The rich seam that is Jansson's adult prose continues with this penultimate collection of short stories, written in her seventies at the height of her Moomin fame and translated into English for the first time. In these light-footed, beautifully crafted yet disquieting stories, Jansson tells of discomfiting encounters, unlooked for connections and moments of isolation that span generations and decades. Letters From Klara proves yet again her mastery of this literary form.

The island of Otterøya, a rural backwater of Norway, provides the setting for Book Two of Tiller's multi-award winning Encircling trilogy. Its singular premise continues: an enigmatic central character, David, has lost his memory and his friends and family write letters at the behest of his psychiatrist about the lives they once shared. The encircling narratives offered by two childhood friends and the midwife who attended his birth, reveal both the roots of his waywardness and, in a shocking twist, the traumatic secret of his identity.Tiller uses a carefully scored polyphony of voices to present this epic saga of dysfunctional lives misshapen by poverty. As in the work of our own Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, its strength lies in its close domestic focus. Encircling: Book 2 is an intimate and modern portrait of Norwegian life that is both searingly honest and uncomfortably true.Encircling 2 is the second volume of a multi-award winning trilogy, published to acclaim in Norway.