Winter Reads (1)

Reading lists

15 crime books perfect for a winter’s day

Tales Of The Night

Peter Høeg was born in 1957 and followed various callings - dancer, actor, fencer, sailor, mountaineer - before he turned seriously to writing. He published his first novel, The History of Danish Dreams, in 1988, and was called 'the foremost writer of his generation' by Information magazine. His crime novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow received universal acclaim and was an international bestseller.

Love as violence, love as a curse, love as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom, as innocence, as delusion – each story takes place on the night of 19 March 1929 and a character tries to understand or express love from his or her perspective: as dancer, lawyer, astronomer, mathematician, artist, actor, doctor, mirror-maker. This book, inhabited by real and imagined characters at the mid point between the two world wars, was an early landmark in a career that includes the controversial novel Borderliners and perhaps the most attractive thriller of the decade, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.

Borderliners

Peter Høeg (Author) Peter Høeg was born in 1957 and followed various callings - dancer, actor, fencer, sailor, mountaineer - before he turned seriously to writing. He published his first novel, The History of Danish Dreams, in 1988, and was called 'the foremost writer of his generation' by Information magazine. His crime novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow received universal acclaim and was an international bestseller.

Three emotionally damaged children were all under assessment in Biehl's experimental school, they were all borderliners. Fully alert to their guinea-pig status they attempt to escape and expose its oppresive mechanisms.

The History Of Danish Dreams

Peter Høeg's first novel is an interweaving of the lives and loves of four families, within which histories time expands, clocks stop or race forward at will. The dreams and disappointments of the children of the author's magnificent imagination foreshadow the themes of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and Borderliners

The Elephant Keepers' Children

What would you do if your parents were con artists? A delightful picaresque novel from the author of Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow.

Hugely enjoyable…both moving and oddly profound

Peter Høeg displays a glorious facility for the absurd as well as the picaresque, and the hilarity of Peter Finø's narrative makes this a delightful novel

This is a strange, beguiling novel, which combines madcap adventure with reflections on trust, affection and individual spiritual life

The Elephant Keepers' Children is, on its own terms, a serene and cheerful and beautifully constructed tale...it has just that extra nudge of extravagant, humorous implausibility which undeniably removes it from realism

Høeg's sense of humour is wonderful, and his Homeric laughter unfolds over the madhouse that he constructs

There is lots of action, humour, satire and spirituality in Peter Høeg's thriller

A comic, extravagant romp that will leave the reader both bewildered and endeared at once

Peter Høeg (Author) Peter Høeg was born in 1957 and followed various callings - dancer, actor, fencer, sailor, mountaineer - before he turned seriously to writing. He published his first novel, The History of Danish Dreams, in 1988, and was called 'the foremost writer of his generation' by Information magazine. His crime novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow received universal acclaim and was an international bestseller. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken’s translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark

Peter and Tilte are trying to track down two notorious criminals: their parents. They are the pastor and the organist, respectively, of the only church on the tiny island of Finø. Known for fabricating cheap miracles to strengthen their congregation's faith, they have been in trouble before. But this time their children suspect they are up to mischief on a far greater scale. 
 
When Peter and Tilte learn that scientific and religious leaders from around the world are assembling in Copenhagen for a conference, they know their parents are up to something. Peter and Tilte's quest to find them exposes conspiracies, terrorist plots, an angry bishop, a deranged headmaster, two love-struck police officers, a deluded aristocrat and much more along the way.

Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

Read Høeg's delicious, icy-cool, Scandinavian detective story while sunbathing on a Caribbean beach. We guarantee it will make you shiver.

Independent on Sunday, Greatest Holiday Reads Ever

The original Scandinavian thriller 
 
One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop.The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah's neighbour, Smilla, an expert in the ways of snow and ice, suspects murder. She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.

The Quiet Girl

A fast-paced philosophical thriller of rare quality from the author of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

Superb new novel...At once intricate and explosive, The Quiet Girl is elegantly written and furiously plotted, resonant (though not acoustically) of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy and also David Mamet's elaborately staged deceptions

In Høeg's hallucinatory prose, Copenhagen has a sinister near-future feel... there are also passages of lyrical beauty

Striking and deeply felt... confirms that Høeg is a writer determined to make new footprints in the snow

He writes entertainingly, at times lyrically, at times scathingly

The Quiet Girl has Hoeg's best-selling hallmarks - including an off-kilter hero in the shape of Kasper Krone, a world-famous clown with a penchant for poker and mysticism

Nadia Christensen has created an amazingly faithful, readable version of Hoeg's Danish, idiomatic, allusive and crowded with philosophical, aesthetic and scientific memorabilia... all is illuminated by the author's passionate interest, his flashes of sparkling wit, and his skill in tying up all the loose ends of the wildly eccentric plot

Hoeg is an able storyteller ... he writes entertainingly, at times lyrically, at times scathingly.  The text is full of "little golden eggs" as Kasper puts it

If you're wanting intellectual liveliness and originality (and lots of Bach), look no further

Peter Hoeg has created a novel filled with spirituality and music...never fails to surprise and enchant

Set in Denmark in the here and now, The Quiet Girl centres around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities in return for his help safeguarding a group of children with mystical abilities. 
 
When one of the children goes missing a year later, Krone sets off to find the young girl and bring her back, making a shocking series of discoveries along the way about her identity and the true intentions of his young wards.

The Woman And The Ape

From the author of international success Smilla’s Sense of Snow, comes a brilliant, hilarious and thought-provoking love story, which unites fantasy, fable, and myth with reality, and a woman with an ape.

The Woman and the Ape has many arrestingly stylish and inventive passages and an overall brilliance of tone that shows once again the originality of Mr. Hoeg's voice

No imaginative writer working today is any more daring than Danish  novelist Peter Hoeg... An utterly original mix of fantasy, fable, myth,  and love story

Høeg is a writer determined to make new footprints in the snow

The woman is Madelene, rich, beautiful and alcoholic; the ape, intelligent and illegally imported to London by Madelene's husband Burden. Burden has plans, so does Madelene, and so, as it happens, does the ape. This most controversial of Høeg's novels takes us from Society London, across its roof-tops to a forest idyll, to make for a fable at once hilarious and thought-provoking.

Peter Høeg

Martin Aitken

An artfully written, exuberant thriller with a mercurial and interesting central character

It's a rare treat to read a book by the far-from-prolific Danish author Peter Høeg. . .  His latest novel is an offbeat futuristic thriller. . . the challenges Hoeg sets his readers are well worth taking on

A well-tuned and clever femi-thriller.

A continually surprising conspiracy thriller.

Peter Høeg is back. And better. And with a novel that is both a thriller, a social critique, and existentially provoking – and on top of that, wonderful and funny.

The main character bares a clear resemblance to a certain Miss Smilla. It is not often that Høeg writes a new novel, but this one has clearly been worth the long wait.

Susan is a resourceful action heroine, part Lisbeth Salander, part Saga Norén, fearless with a crowbar and a screwdriver

The Susan Effect introduces an eccentric mix of characters headed by its ultra-bright narrator, Susan Svendson. . . Hoeg is serious, funny, intelligent, ridiculous, preachy, wise, incomprehensible, surreal and persuasive. It’s very readable

Peter Høeg is back with a new thriller about quantum physics and the fact that the elite is neglecting the rest of society…the novel is a well-placed kick into high society’s modern powdered wigs.

The Danish author is back on form in this literary thriller, which revolves around a woman who has the power to make people tell her their secrets.

You'll tell her your darkest secrets 
 
Susan Svendsen has an unusual talent. She is an expert in finding out secrets. People feel compelled to confide in her and unwittingly confess their innermost thoughts. Her whole life, she has exploited this talent, but now her family is in jeopardy and there is a prison sentence hanging over her head. 
 
Then Susan gets a timely offer from a former government official: use her power one more time and have all charges dropped. But there are some powerful people determined to stop her.

Peter Høeg

Books by Peter Høeg

Articles featuring Peter Høeg

15 crime books perfect for a winter’s day

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