SMILLA Jasperson knows snow. The daughter of a Greenlander hunter mother and a Danish millionaire doctor father, her childhood in Greenland has left her able to find her way in snow and fog, to 'read' ice, so she can walk where others fear to tread.
When Isaiah, the six-year-old son of her alcoholic neighbour, is found dead on the ground outside her seven-storey apartment block, an apparent suicide, Smilla studies his footprints in the snow on the roof and knows that all is not as it seems. When Isaiah jumped he was running, being chased by someone of whom he was very afraid.
It is this discovery and her decision to do something about it that are at the heart of this book, both the mystery and its political and psychological aspects. When Smilla gets nowhere with the doctor who carries out the autopsy on Isaiah and the police close the case, she files a complaint with the Attorney-General's office.
That decision - one that comes with an insight at his funeral that 'all along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now' - plunges Smilla into a world of violence, deceit and crime, and the reader into a tense, compelling thriller with a momentum that effortlessly outlasts almost 500 pages.
Peter Hoeg, a 37-year-old Dane who was everything from an actor to a mountaineer before becoming a serious writer, is being hailed as a major new talent for this work. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is his first novel to be translated into English.
The accolades are richly deserved. This is not just a thriller, not just the tale of Smilla's investigation of Isaiah's death. It is also the story of her awakening to a part of herself from which she has deliberately become distanced, of her transition from a life governed by numbers and mathematics - a life she has created for herself and believes is what she wants, yet in which there's no place for sharp knives in her kitchen, lest one bad day she picks one up and cuts her throat.
'I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings.' At least, that's how it was. Now, despite her fear of jail - the thought of confinement is intolerable to a space-loving Greenlander - her commitment to Isaiah, loyalty and love drive her on.
