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 summer cottage on a lake island in eastern Finland, Dee accepts with relief. And, for a short while, there are 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. A woodpecker proves not to be a woodpecker. A bear is not a bear. Long buried history refuses to stay buried, and what initially looked like escape becomes, unexpectedly, a chance to renew.

Warm, wise, and quietly funny, The Persistence of Light is a luminous novel about human relationships—with each other, with nature, and with our selves.