My bookshelf·Index No. 0202

Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Peter Høeg·Picador·1992·512 pages
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A six-year-old Greenlandic boy falls off a Copenhagen rooftop and the police call it an accident. Smilla Jaspersen, half Inuit, half Danish, a glaciologist who fits nowhere and likes nobody, looks at the tracks in the snow on that roof and knows the boy was running from someone — because she can read snow the way other people read a page. Her investigation goes from the housing block to a shipping company to a ship bound for a glacier off Greenland with a very strange cargo. It’s a thriller, a novel about Danish colonialism, and a great cold book.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow
By Peter Høeg. Picador, 1992. 512 pages.