Smilla Jaspersen is a Copenhagen glaciologist, half Greenlandic and half Danish, who understands snow and ice far better than she understands most people. When a six-year-old Inuit boy from her building, Isaiah, falls from a roof, the police call it an accident. Smilla reads the footprints in the snow and knows he was running from something. Her private investigation leads from Copenhagen's bureaucracies to a shipping company and an expedition to Greenland, with a secret tied to ice and its hidden cargo.
The book suits readers who like a crime novel led by a cold, precise, prickly narrator and a strong sense of place. Along the way you learn how snow behaves, what Danish colonialism left behind in Greenland, and why a woman who trusts physics over people ends up fighting for one small boy.
Balanced in tone; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Story Seeker. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 2004
- Publisher
- Rowohlt
- ISBN
- 9783499237010
- Language
- DE
