Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

This utterly engrossing novel begins when a small boy, Isaiah Christensen falls to his death from a Copenhagen rooftop. An accident, the police say. The boy’s neighbour, Smilla Jasperson, a Greenlander living in Denmark, is a world expert on ice and snow and she realises that the boy’s footsteps in the snow show that he ran to his death. When she decides to investigate who might have been chasing him, she embarks on a harrowing journey towards the truth about crimes that go far beyond the death of one child. Travelling back to her native Greenland and its icebound shores, she unearths a terrible secret. Peter Høeg’s novel combines the gripping tensions of the best thriller with the rich characterisation and depth of literary fiction. In Smilla Jasperson, a tough-talking, determined outsider and shrewd misanthropist, Høeg has created one of the most unforgettable female characters in contemporary fiction.