Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, published in the United States as Smilla's Sense of Snow, is a novel by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg, first published in Danish in 1992 as Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. It follows Smilla Jaspersen, a thirty-seven-year-old woman of mixed Greenlandic and Danish heritage living in Copenhagen, who befriends a young Greenlandic boy, Isaiah, in her apartment building. When Isaiah is found dead after apparently falling from the building's roof, the police rule it an accident, but Smilla's expert knowledge of snow and ice, drawn from her Greenlandic upbringing, convinces her from the pattern of his footprints that his death was not accidental. Her private investigation leads her from Copenhagen to a remote, glaciated island off Greenland, where she uncovers a decades-old conspiracy involving a meteorite hidden in the ice and a lethal parasitic organism, and comes to believe Isaiah was killed to keep the expedition's discovery secret. The novel became an international bestseller, named a best book of 1993 by Time and Entertainment Weekly, and critics have credited it with introducing American readers to Scandinavian crime fiction while also engaging seriously with Denmark's colonial history and treatment of Greenland and its people.