Let's take it to the top of the map!
Greenland is big. As a matter of fact, it is the world's largest island. Greenland, despite it's name, is not verdant, but an icy and cold terrain which lies almost completely in the arctic circle. The icebergs and snow serve as the backdrop for a peculiar event every March: the Ice Golf World Championship in Uummannaq.
Geographically, Greenland is part of North America, but politically, it is part of Europe. Officially, Greenland is part of Denmark, but the island is administered by its own government and the majority of the population is Inuit.
Let's travel!
Historical Fiction
đ The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders is an enthralling novel in the epic tradition of the old Norse sagas. Set in the fourteenth century in Europe’s most far-flung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders is the story of one family–proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Jane Smiley takes us into this world of farmers, priests, and lawspeakers, of hunts and feasts and long-standing feuds, and by an act of literary magic, makes a remote time, place, and people not only real but dear to us.
Mystery/Thriller
đ The Boy With the Narwhal Tooth by Christoffer Petersen
(Greenland Missing Persons #1)
When a young Greenlandic boy is reported missing almost 12 months to the day he disappeared, newly trained Police Constable Petra Jensen travels to the far north of Greenland to find him.
The Boy with the Narwhal Tooth is the first in a new series of Greenland Missing Persons novellas set in the harsh, unpredictable Arctic, rich in tradition, myth and culture.
đ Seven Graves One Winter by Christoffer Petersen
(Greenland Crime #1)
In the remote Arctic community of Inussuk, seven graves are dug at the end of each summer, before the ground freezes. As winter approaches, the question is, will they be enough?
When Constable David Maratse is invalided off the force, he moves to a remote Arctic island to live the life of a subsistence fisherman. But when his long line hooks the body of a politician’s daughter, he finds himself both prime suspect and lead investigator in Greenland’s most sensational murder case.
đ Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg
When caustic Smilla Jaspersen discovers that her neighbor-a neglected six-year-old boy, and possibly her only friend-has died in a tragic accident, a peculiar intuition tells her it was murder. Unpredictable to the last page, Smilla's Sense of Snow is one of the most beautifully written and original crime stories of our time, a new classic.
đ Night Without End by Alistair MacLean
An airliner crashes in the polar ice-cap. In temperatures 40 degrees below zero, six men and four women survive. But for the members of a remote scientific research station who rescue them, there are some sinister questions to answer -- the first one being, who shot the pilot before the crash?
Non-fiction - Travel
đ The Explorer's Daughter by Kari Herbert
Kari lived with the Inuit with her parents Wally and Marie Herbert for two years from the age of 10 months.
đ This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich
For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.
Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.”
This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.
đ An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie
TÊtÊ-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all.
Romance
đ Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney
Flora Mackie was twelve when she first crossed the Arctic Circle on her father's whaling ship. Now she is returning to the frozen seas as the head of her own exploration expedition. Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan, but his yearning for new horizons leads him to the Arctic as part of a rival expedition. When he and Flora meet, all thoughts of science and exploration give way before a sudden, all-consuming love.
The affair survives the growing tensions between the two groups, but then, after one more glorious summer on the Greenland coast, Jakob joins his leader on an extended trip into the interior, with devastating results.
The stark beauty of the Arctic ocean, where pack ice can crush a ship like an eggshell, and the empty sweep of the tundra, alternately a snow-muffled wasteland and an unexpectedly gentle meadow, are vividly evoked. Against this backdrop Penney weaves an irresistible love story, a compelling look at the dark side of the golden age of exploration, and a mystery that Flora, returning one last time to the North Pole as an old woman, will finally lay to rest.
Classic
đ The Polar Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan
A short story by Danish Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan about Thorkild Muller, a reclusive, undereducated, and outcast Danish pastor who is reassigned to a parish in Greenland. Muller quickly finds a sense of belonging and fulfillment living with the Inuit, and becomes integrated into their nomadic society. In his old age, however, Muller returns to Denmark and finds himself unexpectedly embroiled in a confrontation with the Danish church.
Middle Grade
đ First Light by Rebecca Stead
Thea has never seen the sun. Her world lies deep within a glacier, a place of great beauty, hardship and superstition. She longs for her people to return to the surface, but her search forces her to defy her powerful grandmother - and reveals the truth behind her mother's tragic death.
Peter has arrived in Greenland to live on the ice while his father studies climate change. There, he is troubled by strange visions - visions that lead him to a crevice in the glacier...
Rebecca Stead's debut novel is an intriguing tale of secrets, mystery and breathtaking courage.
Literary Fiction
đ No One Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer
"You'll want to scratch." These spoken words open to us the strange and beguiling world of young Rudy Spruance, forced to join the military due to a mysterious past, and sent for some inexplicable reason to a top-secret military hospital in Greenland. There he meets a wide cast of unusual and colorful characters, outcasts and rejects all; begins to fall for the commanding officer's leggy and strong-willed girlfriend; and slowly uncovers the awful secret behind the portion of the base dubbed "the Wing."
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