We learn that if you step on moss once it will rise up the next time it rains, step on it twice and it won't rise up, step on it three times and it dies. And the textures and secrets of the island are visceral. The sea is always there, 'a long blue landscape of vanishing waves' – bringing guests, cooking up storms, enabling them to escape to other islands. They play together, fight and get bored with each other and yet, through each encounter, they learn something new about themselves, their world or their place within it.

But it is with her grandmother that Sophia engages. Sophia's mother has died at the start of the book and the father is always lurking in the margins of the pages. Someone who's really interested ought to write a book about them.'' Sophia turns up that evening with an exercise book in which she writes the title 'A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart.' 'I don't think anyone's ever taken sufficient interest in angleworms. Although she only ever prompts the child rather than directs: ''You know,' Grandmother said.

Sophia is appalled at accidentally cutting an angleworm in half and so the grandmother suggests she write a book about them.

A postcard arrives from Venice and they set about creating canals in the mud and building palazzos from matchboxes. The characters' terrain is limited – a small forest, a beach, a bog, some moss-covered granite – and yet their imaginations are endless.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson