Smilla's Sense of Snow
Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen is a 37-year-old half-Greenlandic glaciologist living in a Copenhagen apartment building when Isaiah, the six-year-old Inuit boy from the floor above, falls from the snowy rooftop and dies. The Danish police rule it an accident. Smilla reads the tracks in the snow and knows the boy was running from someone. Her investigation pulls in a mining company called Kryolitselskabet, a series of polar expeditions hidden in the company archive, and a meteor under the ice off the Greenland coast that the corporation has been chasing for decades. Hoeg published the book in Danish in 1992 and it became the first Scandinavian crime novel to crack the New York Times bestseller list.
What you might want to know about Smilla's Sense of Snow
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A half-Greenlandic glaciologist in Copenhagen investigates the rooftop death of an Inuit child and uncovers a corporate Arctic conspiracy in the Danish literary thriller that broke Scandinavian crime in America.
Yes. A 1997 film adaptation directed by Bille August and starring Julia Ormond was released. The film is widely considered to capture the novel's atmosphere even though it simplifies some plot elements.
Yes. Smilla's Sense of Snow was written by Peter Hoeg and originally published in Danish as Froken Smillas fornemmelse for sne in 1992. The English title varies (Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow in the UK).
Smilla's Sense of Snow was written by Peter Hoeg, published in 1994 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Smilla's Sense of Snow is a standalone novel by Peter Hoeg, not part of a series.
Smilla's Sense of Snow is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.