Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Smilla Jaspersen, a prickly half-Inuit Greenlander in Copenhagen with an expert's feeling for ice and snow, refuses to believe that the small Greenlandic boy from her building simply fell to his death, and her investigation uncovers a secret mining conspiracy that draws her onto a ship bound for a remote Greenland glacier. Høeg's thriller maps a real geography: the wintry Copenhagen of the harbour and the cryolite company, the voyage north across the Atlantic, and the ice of Greenland that is Smilla's true element.

Isaiah

The building (Isaiah's fall)

The death

When the small Greenlandic boy Isaiah falls from the snowy roof of their Copenhagen building, everyone calls it an accident, but Smilla, reading the single track of his footprints in the snow, knows he was fleeing something. Høeg opens on this refusal to accept the easy story, and on the bond between the lonely woman and the dead child that drives everything to come.

The opening chapters

explicit Smilla and the boy Isaiah live in an apartment block by the Copenhagen waterfront, from whose snowy roof he falls to his death; sited in the harbour district of the city.

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