Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

(, Main)

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Description

When Clarissa Iverton was fourteen years old, her mother disappeared leaving Clarissa to be raised by her father. Upon his death, Clarissa, now twenty-eight, discovers he wasn't her father after all. Abandoned by her fiance, Clarissa travels to New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle - to Lapland. There, under the northern lights, Clarissa not only unearths her family's secrets, but also the truth about herself.

Reviews

Vida's prose has the purity of the Lapland winter that it describes... the writing possesses the clarity of church bells or winter light. -- Neel Mukherjee * The Times *
Beautifully written... The writing is deceptively light: you can skip through it, happily enjoying its spare, humorous style, but there are subtleties that call for slow reading... then the book really takes off, growing darker and deeper. -- Jonathan Gibbs * Daily Telegraph *
Graceful and inventive. -- Peter Carty * Independent *
The whole book [has] peculiarly biting charm, a narrative that manages to be both eerily surreal and fundamentally credible. -- Madison Smartt Bell * New York Times *

Author Bio

Vendela Vida is the author of the acclaimed novel And Now You Can Go (Cape, 2003). She is the co-editor of the Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and is a founding board member and teacher at 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing lab.