Vendela Vida's novels are about epiphanies. In her third and newest, The Lovers, an older widow named Yvonne travels to Turkey just because that's where she and her husband Peter honeymooned decades before. Yvonne doesn't speak a word of Turkish, and she doesn't feel any particular curiosity about the culture beyond her general good-natured desire to like people: She wants to use her personal history with the location to reignite her memories of Peter.

And so she makes typical wealthy-tourist mistakes. Rather than placing us above Yvonne as an aloof viewer, Vida drops us in her head, as when she's driving:

Everyone around her was driving well below the speed limit, as though they were lost and looking. Soon she was driving faster than the other cars, which had started pulling off onto the shoulder of the road to let her pass. They honked their horns at her and flashed their lights as though saluting her speed. She felt bold, strong.

A clear-eyed reader knows something is wrong even as Yvonne, wearied by old grief, confuses warnings for empowerment (she's incautiously driving on fresh tar, coating her rental car with a thick layer of the stuff). The Lovers is about extricating yourself from the fog that rises after a tragedy.

Vida's ardent fans will notice similarities; her debut, And Now You Can Go, is about a woman who, after surviving a near-fatal confrontation, quietly learns how to live again during a trip to the Philippines. In Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, someone suddenly upends her comfortable life and travels to Lapland in the hopes of uncovering her roots. In an interview with The Stranger last year, Vida confirmed that The Lovers was to be the last book in an unofficial trilogy linked by themes: of travel, and healing, and coming home. While The Lovers is a satisfying journey on its own, if you read it along with Vida's other novels, you'll see it as a capstone, an emotional conclusion for all three.

One scene early in The Lovers feels emblematic of Vida's work: After Peter's memorial, Yvonne finds a note tucked under the windshield wipers of her car:

"Can't you see what you did? If you had parked your car one foot back someone else could have parked in front of you. But you didn't. Next time, try not to be so selfish. Try to think of other people in this world."

Like even the most ill-timed messages, there's something there worth keeping. I couldn't imagine a better name for this unofficial trilogy than that: Try to Think of Other People in This World.

Vendela Vida reads Thurs July 15, University Book Store, 7 pm, free.