Smilla's Sense of Snow

Since I’ve traveled a lot above the Arctic Circle, I relish a good Nordic noir.

Smilla, part Greenlander and part Dane travels from Copenhagen back to Greenland on a quest for truth about a brutal death deemed an accident.

The gripping ending included elements I found fascinating, Inuit culture, human evil, and extreme weather. 

I have reread this novel several times since I discovered it in the 1990s, and it continues to surprise and thrill me. Smilla Jasperson is the most original heroine I’ve ever come across. Rude, tortured, brilliant, philosophical, strong, vulnerable—she is half Greenlandic Inuit/half Danish, and her heart has been broken by the loss of both mother and country. At the start of the novel it is broken again when a young, neglected boy, she’d finally allowed herself to love, dies. The authorities claim it’s accidental but Smilla immediately knows, because she understands snow, that he has been killed. The plot… show more.

A passenger in Chicago O’Hare International Airport pressed a battered paperback copy of this book into my hands as I boarded my plane. I was in my early and impressionable twenties, on my way back to the UK, and had no idea that my life was about to change. It’s that kind of book. I knew next to nothing about Greenland, and even less about Denmark. Smilla’s Sense of Snow introduced me to the people, the culture, and the messy history that connects the two countries all wrapped up in a thrilling page-turner. I inhaled it on the flight home,… show more.