Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

Atlantic, £10.99

The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger

Picador, £14.99

HOW CLICHÉD IS IT TO have a novel turn around a 29-year-old woman discovering after her father's funeral, that the dead man is not her biological parent and then embarking on a journey to discover her real one?

The answer must emphatically be “not in the slightest” if the book is Vendela Vida’s second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.

Clarissa Iverton – named after Samuel Richardson’s heroine – leaves her boyfriend, Pankaj, behind in their apartment in Brooklyn and travels to Lapland to hunt down her origins. Disappearing seems to be a family trait: Clarissa’s mother left her husband and two children and vanished nearly 16 years ago.

As you might guess, Clarissa’s quest holds more surprises than a simple answer to the identity of her father, but nothing prepares you for the nature of those surprises, or for the way they spin the narrative in directions you never assumed it could take.

Vida’s prose has the purity of the Lapland winter that it describes. This is not to say that she writes the blanched prose of, say, Coetzee, or that her uncluttered writing lacks warmth and feeling. Behind the measured beauty of her sentences glide vast emotional currents. This is far from the minimalism of Raymond Carver; the writing possesses the clarity of church bells or winter light. And Vida has Ali Smith’s ability of investing an austere sentence of observation with an entire microcli-mate of inner weather.

In the end, Clarissa repeats a version of her mother’s history, the irony being that both women, in their different ways, are trying to escape the past. “And when I hear people say that you can't start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think, You can. You must,” Clarissa muses. But the question that echoes long after you have closed the book is about the eventual success of such a flight.

The past, with its various readings, misreadings and rewritings, is also at the centre of Nell Freudenberger’s searingly intelligent first novel The Dissident. Freudenberger generated a huge amount of hype with her debut collection of stories, Lucky Girls. This novel can only consolidate that, for there is an incandescent talent at work here, a sensibility that can devise a rich plot, people it with not just believable but developing characters, and animate the whole thing with an intellectual and moral energy that never shies from asking the big questions.

It tells two stories: that of the wealthy Cece Travers and her family in Beverly Hills and that of a dissident Chinese artist, Yuan Zhao, who comes to stay at their beautiful home on a year’s fellowship to UCLA.

While the story of the Travers is told in the third person, Freudenberger gives her dissident a first-person narrative, playing off different subjectivities against each other. This proves a shrewd strategy because, from the very beginning, we are left in no doubt that all is not what it seems with the dissident: there is much evasion in his narrative, which impinges on the Los Angeles strand of the story.

As the truth slowly emerges, about his past in the revolutionary and subversive artists’ colony of Beijing’s “East Village” at a precarious moment in Chinese politics – around the time of the Tianan-men Square massacre – the lives of everyone look set to be changed irrevocably.

To discover a young writer not disappearing into postmodern doodling or navel-gazing but training her formidable acuity on big themes – authenticity and copying, truth and lies, posterity and the present – is news indeed.

Freudenberger’s novel unfolds into that rare thing, a work of poetics itself, a meditation on the nature of representation in art. The fact that she does it with such wit and compassion, such generosity of mind and heart, is miraculous.

Click here to buy these books

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide