Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

“A taut, intricately layered page-turner that looks deeply and fearlessly into matters of profound human concern.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Winner of the Kate Chopin Award

On the day of her father’s funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iver­ton discovers that he wasn’t her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and her fiancé has just revealed a life-changing secret to her. Alone and adrift, Clarissa travels to mystical Lapland, where she believes she’ll meet her real father. There, at a hotel made of ice, Clarissa is confronted with the truth about her mother’s his­tory and must make a decision about how—and where—to live the rest of her life.

“Brilliant.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Vida’s terrific new novel is a taut, tense, terse examination of family and identity . . . [with] the grip and pace of a thriller.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“[A] stirring novel . . . as alive and fascinating as the brilliant atmospheric phenomenon of its title.” —Chicago Tribune

“Reading this book reminded me . . . how rarely a writer as precise, artful, and passionate as Vendela Vida comes along.” —George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning author

“[A] tone of dark whimsy suffuses the whole book and accounts for much of its peculiarly biting charm.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Vida gives the icy landscape an eerie, forbidding beauty and her writing has . . . great emotional acuity.” —The New Yorker

“A luminescent and evocative tale of grief, free of the standard clichés.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)