Something people are prepared to kill to conceal has been found on a remote island off the coast of Greenland. Smilla Jaspersen, a doggedly determined Inuk with a feeling for snow, becomes involved when a young boy she has befriended is murdered.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is wonderfully atmospheric, with the awesome immensity of the northern ice and sea made blindingly real, and Smilla herself is one of the most original amateur detectives I have come across. The tension and the mystery are built up steadily throughout the book, but Høeg falls down at the end: the big secret is too implausibly momentous, and too tenuously connected to the rest of the story, to provide a satisfying resolution of the plot.

Note: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was published as Smilla's Sense of Snow in the United States.

July 1994

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- Richard Adams - The Girl in a Swing
- more Scandinavian literature
- more detective fiction