What to read after “Smilla's Sense of Snow” by Peter Høeg: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
An aging Cuban fisherman, Santiago, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When a huge marlin finally takes his line far out to sea, he must hold on through a long, painful contest of endurance and will.
Michael Palin follows HMS Erebus from its Antarctic voyages to the Arctic search for the Northwest Passage, where it set out with HMS Terror in 1845 and vanished. Drawing on letters, logs and the later discovery of the wrecks, the book tells the story of the ship and the men who sailed her.
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
In 1845 two Royal Navy ships sail to find the Northwest Passage and vanish into the Arctic ice. As the crews endure cold, scurvy and starvation, they are stalked across the frozen waste by a creature that should not exist.
In 1859, a disgraced Irish surgeon signs on as doctor of a whaling ship bound for the Arctic. Among the crew is a brutal harpooner with his own plans, and as the voyage turns from routine to disaster, the two men are set on a collision course.
In 1879 the USS Jeannette sails for the Arctic, chasing a theory about a warm open sea at the pole. Trapped and then crushed by the ice, the crew abandon ship and begin a desperate march across the pack toward Siberia.
A physicist is knocked out and wakes in a version of Chicago where he never married and never had a son. To get home, he must cross a multiverse of his own choices while another version of himself hunts him.
A literary critic survives a ferry collision in San Francisco Bay and is picked up by a sealing schooner commanded by Wolf Larsen, a brutal and brilliant captain. Thrown into the crew's rough life, the soft scholar must find his footing under a man who answers to no law but his own.
A wandering sailor joins the whaling ship Pequod, whose captain is obsessed with hunting the white whale that took his leg. As the voyage stretches across the oceans, the crew is dragged toward a reckoning. A vast, digressive novel of obsession, the sea and human nature.
Virginia Reeve is hired to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of a lost expedition. When only some of them come back, she is tried for murder in Boston. The courtroom testimony and the journey north slowly reveal what happened out on the ice.
Laid up in hospital with a broken leg, Inspector Alan Grant is bored until he is given a portrait of Richard III. Wondering whether the king really murdered the princes in the Tower, he reopens a five-hundred-year-old case from his bed, working only from books.
In 1921, an Iñupiat seamstress joins a Canadian expedition to Wrangel Island as a cook. When the men leave or die, she is left alone on the island for months, learning to hunt and survive while waiting for a rescue that may never come.
After a shipwreck, a teenage boy shares a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. For months he struggles to survive at sea while holding on to his beliefs and his story. A fable about faith, storytelling and the versions of events we choose to believe.
A British weather station on an Arctic ice floe sends a distress call after a fire. A US nuclear submarine is sent to rescue the survivors, but the narrator, a doctor with unclear orders, finds that the station was also a listening post and that someone aboard is lying.
In a medieval abbey, a monk and his sharp-witted teacher investigate a series of bizarre deaths among the scribes. Clues lead to a forbidden book and a labyrinthine library that hides more than manuscripts. A historical mystery steeped in philosophy and dread.
Years after the war against the Formics, Andrew Wiggin travels as a Speaker for the Dead, revealing the truth of the departed. On the colony world Lusitania he is drawn into the fate of a human family and the alien Pequeninos, whose customs hide a terrible secret.
In 1914 Ernest Shackleton sets out to cross Antarctica; in 1915 his ship is crushed by the ice and the crew is left stranded. This account follows their months on drifting floes and the desperate open-boat journey he makes to seek rescue.
A sailor tells of his journey up an African river to reach a mysterious ivory trader who has become a god to the locals. The deeper he goes, the more he sees of greed and cruelty, and of what people become when no one restrains them. A short, unsettling classic.
A man and his girlfriend drive to his parents' remote farm so she can meet them. Through the long winter journey she keeps turning over a private thought about ending the relationship, while small details around them begin to feel wrong.
An escaped Australian convict flees to Bombay under a false name and disappears into the city's hidden world. He runs a clinic in a slum, is drawn into the orbit of a mafia boss and a guarded woman, and is remade by betrayal, imprisonment and war.
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.
In a future run by the collective, the word I has no meaning and all work is done for the good of all. Equality 7-2521 breaks the rules by doing forbidden research and falling in love, then flees a society that cannot allow an individual to exist.
Abandoned by her family as a child, Kya grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh, shunned by the nearby town as the Marsh Girl. She teaches herself to survive on the land and inches toward love, until a local man is found dead and she becomes the chief suspect.
A group of schoolboys survives a plane crash on a deserted island and tries to govern themselves. Order slips first into fear and then into savagery as the boys turn on one another. An allegory about civilisation, violence and what people become without rules.
What should I read after “Smilla's Sense of Snow”?
Start with “The Old Man and the Sea”, “Erebus: The Story of a Ship”, “The Left Hand of Darkness”: they are the closest to “Smilla's Sense of Snow” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Smilla's Sense of Snow” these are Arctic, Outcast Hero, Forbidden Knowledge), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Erebus: The Story of a Ship”, “The Terror”, “The North Water”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
