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|title=The Sunlit Night

|sort=Sunlit Night, The

|publisher=Bloomsbury

|date=June 2015

|website=http://www.rebeccadinerstein.com/

|summary=A debut novel as charming as it is quirky. Two young adults from Brooklyn meet in the far north of Norway, where one is an artist's apprentice and the other is burying a beloved father. Bittersweet family backstories and burgeoning romance make this a winner.

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Frances comes from a 'desperately artistic family', her father a medical illustrator and her mother an interior designer. Along with her younger sister Sarah, she grew up in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan: bunk beds for the girls and a fold-out sofa bed for the parents. The claustrophobic atmosphere has gotten to everyone and now, with Frances graduating from college, it looks like the family might fall apart. Her parents argue constantly and disapprove of Sarah's fiancé (not ''just'' because he isn't Jewish). Frances has her own romantic crisis: after a pregnancy scare, Robert breaks up with her. A high-flyer with a future in politics, he tells her that her art has no purpose; it isn't helping anyone. 'What does it matter if you do what you love, if what you love doesn't matter?' she asks her father. Still, she has no other prospects, so agrees to take up a painting apprenticeship in the furthest reaches of Norway; 'All I had was a direction, north.'

Dinerstein, who herself travelled to Lofoten, Norway and got a bilingual poetry collection and this novel out of the experience, has great things ahead of her. I highly recommend her debut, as charming as it is quirky, to fans of Jonathan Safran Foer.

{{amazontext|amazon=1408863049}}