The Persistence of Light
New for Spring 2027
She buzzes her car window down lower, not because she wants to breathe in more of the strangely light air that has lifted her since she stepped off the plane in this Northern world, but because she wants to listen to the emptiness of the fir-and-birch forest that stretches on either side of the flat narrow tar road, the last sweep of her journey.
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. 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. A woodpecker proves not to be a woodpecker. A bear is not a bear. The little island has other plans for Dee and what began as retreat becomes entanglement. What 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. It’s about the fine line between solitude and loneliness, loss and reconnection, buried history, chosen family, land stewardship, the perspicacity of fiction, and the second chances life offers when we stop trying to disappear from it.
Praise
“With the declaration “The emptiness of people./ Paradise.” on the opening page of Anne Korkeakivi’s poetically spare and gorgeous novel, those of us for whom stretches of solitude are as necessary as air know we are in the hands of a spiritual intimate. Joining Dee on her sojourn to the tiny island of Mantysaari, where she hopes in the “pixelated time” of the northern lights to steady herself after the murder of a peacemaker colleague, the lucky reader feels that we too are enlarged by living with nothing more that what is brought by rowboat/fished/foraged and the sweetness of unanticipated human connection.” –Lisa Gornick, author of Ana Turns
“The Persistence of Light is a gorgeously rendered ode to life’s complexities. A woman devoted to a career in conflict resolution in African nations torn by war travels to an idyllic island in Finland in midsummer, to rest and reconsider her choices. From this magical place, unexpected visitors and family secrets become entwined with the beauty and fierceness of the natural world.” —Jessica Brilliant Keener, author of Evening Begins the Day
“How far must we travel to escape the stresses in our life? And what happens when we realize that isn’t possible? The Persistence of Light offers its answer in an enchanting, sensuous tale, amid the beauty of a Finnish summer. Unforgettable!” —Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams
