  miss smilla's feeling for snow or smilla's sense of snow (danish: frÃ¸ken smillas fornemmelse for sne) is a 1992 novel by danish author peter hÃ¸eg. it was translated into english by tiina nunnally (credited as "f. david" in the british edition). ==title== during her greenland childhood smilla developed an almost intuitive understanding of all types of snow and their characteristics. as an adult she worked for a time as a scientist whose speciality was snow and ice. her certainty about the manner of a childâs death is due to this visceral âfeeling for snowâ. ==background== the novel is ostensibly a work of detection and a thriller, although beneath the surface of the novel, hÃ¸eg is concerned with rather deeper cultural issues, particularly denmark's curious post-colonial history, and also the nature of relationships that exist between individuals and the societies in which they are obliged to operate. the protagonist smilla qaaviqaaq jaspersen is a sympathetic and useful vehicle in this respect, her deceased mother being greenlandic inuit and her father a rich danish doctor. having been brought in childhood from the poverty and freedom of greenland to the affluent and highly ordered society of denmark, smilla's relationship with denmark and danish society is strained and ambivalent. smilla investigates the death of a neighborâs child whom she had befriendedâa fellow greenlander, with an alcoholic, neglectful mother and a mysteriously deceased father. the story begins in copenhagen, where the child has fallen to his death from their apartment building's snowy rooftop. the police refuse to consider it anything but an accidentâthere is only one set of footprints (the child's) in the snow leading to the edge of the roofâbut smilla believes there is something about the footprints that shows that the boy was chased off the roof. her investigations lead her to decades-old conspiracies in copenhagen, and then to a voyage on an icebreaker ship to a remote island off the greenlandic coast, where the truth is finally discovered. but the book ends unresolved, with no firm conclusion. an important role in the first part of the book is played by a talented linguist, who has a thoroughly knowledge of the various 
1992_novels Arctic_in_fiction Danish_novels Dilys_Award-winning_works Greenland_in_fiction Novels_set_in_Copenhagen Novels_set_on_islands