Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida

Are you the same person you were 10 or 20 years ago? This novel deals with the conundrum of continuity of identity, but abstract philosophy does not intrude. Instead, we get a story of a dramatic quest at the top of the world.

It starts with the time-honoured device of mistaken paternity. After her father's funeral, Clarissa Iverton looks through his papers. She finds her birth certificate and discovers that she is not his natural daughter. Her real father appears to be a former husband of her mother's, a priest who is a member of the Sami ethnic group in Finnish Lapland. Clarissa leaves her home in New York and sets off to locate him.

If this were not enough, we learn that her mother vanished when Clarissa was 14. There is more: in Lapland, she learns that the priest is not her father either, that the truth behind her antecedents is darker and tied to her mother's disappearance. As well as a search for her father, her journey becomes an investigation into her mother's past.

Vendela Vida adopts a narrative register of assertive revelation, but it is measured rather than strident. Most of her prose is graceful and inventive. Dusk settles in "like a bruise"; when ducks scatter, the sound is "of a hundred decks of cards shuffled at once". There is wintry humour, also. Clarissa and her father stage a memorial ceremony for her mother, burying some of her possessions in a soup terrine.

Clarissa's kick-ass adoption of her quest and bursts of feistiness conflict with an essential passivity. It surfaces early when a bus driver singles her out for a crude attempt at seduction; she laughs in his face but then yields, consoling herself with private self-deprecation ("I had terrible taste in flings"). This disengagement reflects the novel's underlying questioning of personality, yet its persistence leaves her character blurred and remote. It is left to the strong undertow of tragedy - and there is enough of it to make Sophocles blench - to thrust us into close contact with her.

The freezing climate becomes an extended metaphor for the plangency of Clarissa's life. Ultimately, Clarissa can have no fixed points of reference. Her mutability is rendered ever more transparent so that, finally, it is as if her whole existence becomes a single glittering tear, caught for a moment in Vida's gaze before falling away from sight.