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 now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiancé, Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life-changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa's world become myths and rumors, and she is catapulted out of the life she knew.
She finds her birth certificate, which leads her from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle, to mystical Lapland, where she believes she'll meet her real father. There, under the northern lights of a sunless winter, Clarissa comes to know the Sami, the indigenous population, and seeks out a local priest, the one man who may hold the key to her origins.Along her travels she meets an elderly Sami healer named Anna Kristine, who has her own secrets, and a handsome young reindeer herder named Henrik, who accompanies Clarissa to a hotel made of ice. There she is confronted with the truth about her mother's past and finally must make a decision about how—and where—to live the rest of her life.
Joan Didion said of Vendela Vida's last book: "And Now You Can Go is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it's hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is. Vendela Vida has promise to spare." With Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vida more than lives up to that promise as she gives us a remarkable protagonist who is both fierce and funny, and an unforgettable literary thriller that questions whether we can ever truly know where we've come from—and if it is possible to escape our pasts.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Vida, Vendela

United States

Ecco

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.

“Vendela Vida has written a riveting and suspenseful novel about an American woman’s voyage to self-discovery.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Stunning. A masterful meditation on grief and love. The Lovers is a sensational novel from one of our finest writers at the height of her craft.” —Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries
In 2007, Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With her new novel, The Lovers, former Kate Chopin Writing Award winner Vida tells a powerful and beautiful tale of a widow returning alone to the site of her honeymoon in Turkey, and her subsequent journeys through her past and her present.

The Lovers: A Novel

LOVERS

EccoPress

From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.
In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities—she knows she’ll never recover her possessions. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses.
A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she’s inhabiting the actress’s skin off set, too—going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. And so continues a strange and breathtaking journey full of unexpected turns, an adventure in which the woman finds herself moving further and further away from the person she once was.
Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty: A Novel

From the acclaimed author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name comes a taut, spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity
In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she wants to be.
Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.
“Part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery, this full-bodied tale of a runaway is at once formally inventive and heartbreakingly familiar. (It’s also insanely funny.)”—Lena Dunham
“[Vida’s] finest book....With its echoes of Hitchcock and Highsmith, this novel is full of darting pleasures.”—New York Times

Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

NATIONAL BESTSELLER&nbsp; An achingly beautiful story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco&nbsp; Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know Sea Cliff's homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters--as well as the upscale all-girls' school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act--or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance--a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida's masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre-tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one's authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion.&nbsp;

We Run the Tides: A Novel

Literary

Product Description 
NATIONAL BESTSELLER 
An achingly beautiful story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco 
Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know Sea Cliff’s homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters—as well as the upscale all-girls’ school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act—or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola’s sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths. 
Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida’s masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre–tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one’s authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion. 
 Review 
“The year is probably too young to make this kind of pronouncement, but the new novel I know I'm going to be rereading in the coming months and spending a lot of time thinking about is Vendela Vida's 
We Run the Tides. It's a tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in. . . . [A] spectacular narrator . . . [A] wonder of a novel." -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air\n“Vida captures the unstable sensation of early adolescent reality, that period teetering between childhood and young adulthood in which outlandish lies can seem weirdly plausible and basic facts totally alien…the affectionate specificity of the portrait she offers is one of the book’s real pleasures...Vida’s San Francisco is ramshackle and eccentric, home to heiresses but also tide pools of counterculture backwash." 
 -- 
New York Times Book Review\n“Vida populates her stories with liars, runaways, the reckless — those most adept at reconfiguring their appearances, those caught in the process of becoming. She is excellent at writing teenagers, who try on and discard identities as quickly as the days pass. . . . A nod to Edith Wharton. . . . Detailed and vibrant . . . As much a novel of girlhood vulnerability as it is a story fortification and fear.” -- Los Angeles Review of Books\n"Set in a pre-tech boom San Francisco that feels moody, foreboding, and magical, this enigmatic tale of adolescent friendship, a disappearance, and coming-of-age is smart, sly, and as knowing about the mind and heart of a teenage girl as an Elena Ferrante novel." -- O, the Oprah Magazine\n"We Run the Tides is smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it’s also FUNNY. Who knew that you could combine all of those qualities into one slim volume? Not many writers, that’s for sure. I loved every single page, and was sorry when I had to say goodbye to Eulabee and her family.” -- Nick Hornby\n"The dreamy yearning and turmoil of youth are evoked here so vividly as to seem supernaturally conjured. However long ago you were a teenager, 
We Run the Tides will bring the quandaries and sensations right back. Vendela Vida has written a novel of absorbing, exquisite economy and percipience. She has also written an intimate allegory of our unraveling tether to truth.” -- Lisa Halliday, author of 
Asymmetry\n"Vida, whose polished and incisive prose is in the Didion mode, inflects this droll and sensitive coming-of-age tale . . . with eviscerating social commentary. A nimble and arresting drama about the spell cast by beauty, the compulsion to lie, the valor of forthrightness, and the inevitability of the inexplicable." 
 -- 
Booklist 
(starred review)

Harper Large Print

The first original screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Away We Go is the new movie direcetd by Academy Award® winner Sam Mendes.
Longtime couple Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) are expecting a baby, and the impending child's only living grandparents are moving to—where else—Belgium. So Burt and Verona head out on the road, across America, looking for the right place to call home. Along the way they encounter a succession of strange and hilarious friends and relatives (played by a cast that includes Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Maggie Gyllenhall, Josh Hamilton, Allison Janney, and Jim Gaffigan), most of whom have no idea what they’re doing. In the end—with and despite the help of those they meet on their journey—Burt and Verona come closer to an understanding of their own definition of home and family.

Away We Go: A Screenplay

Humor & Entertainment

Eggers, Dave.

Movies

Vintage

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vida, Vendela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vida, Vendela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vida, Vendela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

The Lovers: A Novel

LOVERS

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty: A Novel

Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

We Run the Tides: A Novel

We Run the Tides: A Novel

We Run the Tides: A Novel

Away We Go: A Screenplay