"Each of us has dreams that we inherit. The work of life is discovering our own. Author Julie Catterson Lindahl reflects on an unexpected decade spent raising her young family on a small isolated island in the north and the dream she found there. Through her story of breaking with a corporate career and a cosmopolitan life, an inherited dream, and pursuing an existence in the often harsh Nordic wilderness, Lindahl captures the very essence of the greatest personal challenge that each of us meets: to discover that there is no blueprint for living and that the great work of life is to grow your own rose out of the sand.

Using the eight seasons of the indigenous peoples of the north as her guide, the author takes us on an intimate personal journey in which she sees the world and herself anew through the fine detail of her extraordinary environment. For anyone who has ever felt trapped by preconceptions about themselves, Lindahl opens the door."

The same feeling returned to me so many times during the decade that was to come. This place with all of its overwhelming power, yielded the beauty of its fine detail to me like a benevolent giant: there was the horizon and then the shifting of a tiny pebble as a wave washed the water onto the shore; there was the majestic forest with all of its preying creatures and then the single leaf, slowly blending into the soil; there was me, a part of the dominant species on earth, and a single human as fragile and impossible as a rose in the sand. Our world was so full of contradictions that we struggled to overcome. Here it was all right: our contradictions made us whole. Without them, life had no experience.

Julie Catterson Lindahl is an author, columnist and social entrepreneur living in Sweden. In 2000 she and her husband decided to take a temporary break from their safe, urban existence to try life with their young twins on an island in the Nordic wilderness. This one-year experiment became a decade of learning and survival together. No stranger to new experiences, Lindahl has lived in ten countries on three continents and worked in many more. In "Rose in the Sand" she embarks on a new kind of journey: the inner journey to knowing oneself. Lindahl has a B.A. in English Literature from Wellesley College, an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University and is a Fulbright Scholar. Lindahl is also author of "On My Swedish Island: Discovering the Secrets of Scandinavian Wellbeing" (Tarcher Penguin, 2005), and "Letters from the Island" (Senten.se, 2010). Learn more about Julie Catterson Lindahl at www.julielindahl.com.