Peter Høeg

Told from the perspective of precocious fourteen-year-old Peter, The Elephant Keepers' Children is about three siblings and how they deal with life alongside their eccentric parents. Peter's father is a vicar, his mother an artisan, and both are equally and profoundly devout. The family lives on the fictional island of Fin├©, where people of all faiths coexist peacefully. Yet nothing is as it seems.

When Peter's parents suddenly

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"Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her." "When Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. She has seen his tracks...

These eight stories are linked by a date and a motif. All of them have to do with love. Love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929. In his second book and his only collection of stories, Peter Høeg proves himself to be a true storyteller in the tradition of Karen Blixen and Joseph Conrad. These beautifully constructed tales deal with love, the classic arts and sciences, and the confrontation of Western and non-Western cultures. Moving...