The Persistence of Light

An escape to a remote Finnish island and two weeks of solitude. No people. No problems. That was the plan. But in the endless light of Nordic midsummer, Dee may find the one thing she thought she no longer wanted: a way back into the world.

For decades, Dee has worked in the world’s most fractured places, negotiating between people who have every reason not to trust one another. But after the death of a friend and colleague in the Democratic Republic of Congo, her faith in the work – and in her own judgment—has begun to fail. When a colleague offers her the use of his family’s remote summer cottage on a lake island in Finland, Dee accepts with relief. For two weeks, there will be only birch trees, lake water, sauna smoke, wild strawberries, a book by Tove Jansson, and silence.

Then a girl with pink hair appears in a rowboat.

Soon Dee’s supposedly empty island is no longer empty. There is Kati, the girl’s wary mother; Jari, the handsome and exasperating neighbor whose plans threaten the island’s fragile peace; Mia, the niece Dee barely knows; and Ife, the beloved godson whose arrival forces open questions Dee has spent years trying not to answer. What began as retreat becomes entanglement. What looked like escape becomes, unexpectedly, a chance to renew.

Warm, wise, and quietly funny, Persistence of Light is a luminous novel of escape and reconnection, about grief, chosen family, buried history, and the second chances life offers when we stop trying to disappear from it.