Smilla's Sense of Snow - Softcover

Peter Hoeg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385315147 ISBN 13: 9780385315142

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1995

Synopsis

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love.  She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land.  And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...

It happened in the Copenhagen snow.  A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building.  While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident.  But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own.  Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.  For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....

About this title

Review

In this international bestseller, Peter Høeg successfully combines the pleasures of literary fiction with those of the thriller. Smilla Jaspersen, half Danish, half Greenlander, attempts to understand the death of a small boy who falls from the roof of her apartment building. Her childhood in Greenland gives her an appreciation for the complex structures of snow, and when she notices that the boy's footprints show he ran to his death, she decides to find out who was chasing him. As she attempts to solve the mystery, she uncovers a series of conspiracies and cover-ups and quickly realizes that she can trust nobody. Her investigation takes her from the streets of Copenhagen to an icebound island off the coast of Greenland. What she finds there has implications far beyond the death of a single child. The unusual setting, gripping plot, and compelling central character add up to one of the most fascinating and literate thrillers of recent years.

From the Publisher

"Splendid entertainment...The suspense novel as exploration of the heart."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Astonishing."
--Los Angeles Times

"A superbly constructed thriller...A combination of suspense narrative, Hemingwayeque prose, exotic setting and spellbinding central female."
--People

"A book of profound intelligence...in the league of Melville or Conrad. Heg writes prose that is bitter, changeable and deep-fathomed as poetry...[it] demands to be read aloud and savored."
--The New Yorker

Named Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly and People magazines

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0385315147
• ISBN 13: 9780385315142
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480