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Peter Høeg

    May 17, 1957
    Peter Høeg
    The Woman & the Ape
    The History of Danish Dreams
    Borderliners
    Smilla's Sense of Snow
    Journey Into a Dark Heart and Other Stories from Tales of the Night
    The Elephant Keepers' Children
    • 2017

      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.

      The Susan Effect
    • 2013

      The Elephant Keepers' Children

      A Novel by the Author of Smilla's Sense of Snow

      • 512 pages
      • 18 hours of reading
      3.9(214)Add rating

      The story unfolds through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Peter, exploring the lives of three siblings navigating their unconventional upbringing with deeply religious parents on the fictional island of Finø. While the community boasts harmonious coexistence among various faiths, the family's seemingly idyllic life hides deeper complexities. The narrative delves into themes of faith, family dynamics, and the magic found in everyday experiences, revealing that all may not be as it appears in their vibrant yet peculiar world.

      The Elephant Keepers' Children
    • 2007

      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 Quiet Girl pits art and spirituality against corporate interests and nothing less than the will to war by the industrialized world. This long-awaited novel from the author of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is a fast-paced philosophical thriller of rare quality.

      The Quiet Girl
    • 1997

      These stories, which vary in theme but all bear the mark of Peter Hoeg's graceful and thoughtful prose, are set in eight separate corners of the world. On this fateful night, a young mathematician encounters Joseph Conrad during a train ride through the war-torn Congo in "Journey into a Dark Heart; " a pair of star-crossed lovers in Lisbon dance through their memories of the Danish ballet in "Hommage to Bournonville; " a seaside community struggles with the threat of a smallpox epidemic in "Pity for the Children of Vaden Town; " and in "The Verdict of Ignatio Lanstad Rasker", an idealistic young writer is prosecuted for his homosexuality by the conservative Lord Chief Justice of Denmark. Illuminating, acrobatic, and enriched with historical fact and foreshadowing, the stories in Tales of the Night should "consolidate Hoeg's reputation as one of the world's most versatile authors" (Seattle Times).

      Journey Into a Dark Heart and Other Stories from Tales of the Night
    • 1996

      From the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow comes this highly imaginative novel, In a Danish feudal castle, 1520, a count believes he has pinpointed the center of the universe—a patch of land on his estate. But when his discovery is met with disbelief, he walls off his mansion and has all of the clocks stopped. Four centuries pass instantaneously, and the count's young secretary, Carl, emerges from isolation to find a world bursting with war, innovation, love, sexuality, danger, and all the values of the sixteenth century turned upside down as though by supernatural forces—namely, the force of history. From one of our most gifted international writers comes a dazzling epic fairy tale, a tough fable about the gifts and iniquities of progress.

      The History of Danish Dreams
    • 1996

      The Woman & the Ape

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading
      3.4(1791)Add rating

      Madelene is married to Burden, an ambitious zoologist, comfortably off and a chronic alcoholic. The ape is Erasmus, who comes ashore in London from sailing boat called "The Ark". Burden aims to use the ape as the means to fulfil his ambition to direct the London Zoo. Erasmus and Madelene elope.

      The Woman & the Ape
    • 1995

      Borderliners

      • 277 pages
      • 10 hours of reading
      3.7(2347)Add rating

      They're refugees from orphanages and reform schools, children in danger of being institutionalized for not fitting in: Borderliners . Now they've been given one last chance: transfer to an exclusive private academy where they will be integrated with normal, privileged students. What they don't know--yet--is that they are subjects of a secret experiment in social Darwinism. All they have is time, every moment of which is rigidly managed by their Dickensian academy. For Peter and his newfound friends, August and Katarina, the only escape from the draconian present is in recreating time and space for themselves in an insidious rebellion that is both revolutionary--and suicidal...

      Borderliners
    • 1993

      A stunning literary thriller in the tradition of "Gorky Park" and the novels of John Le Carre. Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen is the daughter of a Danish doctor and an Inuit woman from Greenland. Raised in Greenland, she lives in Copenhagen and, as befits her ancestry, is an expert on snow. When one of her few friends, an Inuit boy, dies under mysterious circumstances, she refuses to believe it was an accident. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her involved. But Smilla persists, and as snow-covered Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation leads her from a fanatically religious accountant, to a tough-talking pathologist, to the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth. Finally, she boards a ship with an international cast of villains - and a large stash of cocaine - bound for a mysterious mission on an inhospitable island off Greenland.

      Smilla's Sense of Snow