Cold Enough for Snow (Paperback)
Jessica Au (author)Published: 23/02/2022
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here – is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another’s inner world.
Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by Fitzcarraldo Editions, New Directions (US) and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 9781913097769
Number of pages: 104
Dimensions: 197 x 125 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
‘Rarely have I been so moved, reading a book: I love the quiet beauty of Cold Enough for Snow and how, within its calm simplicity, Jessica Au camouflages incredible power.’ — Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
‘So calm and clear and deep, I wished it would flow on forever.’ — Helen Garner, author of The First Stone
‘Au’s is a book of deceptive simplicity, weaving profound questions of identity and ontology into the fabric of quotidian banality.... What matters, the novel reassures us, is constantly imbricated with the everyday, just as alienation and tender care can coexist in the same moment.’ — Claire Messud, Harper’s
‘This novella is graceful and precise. Like the narrator fine-tuning the aperture on her Nikon camera, Au seems to say, we have to choose our scale, what we pay attention to. ...Finally, we bump up against what is not knowable. Au has mentioned her taste for “subverting narrative expectation ... open endings, scenes in which nothing happens yet everything happens”. Cold Enough for Snow is exactly this, a book of inference and small mysteries. The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions ... Aesthetic, opaque, endlessly uncoiling.’ — Imogen Dewey, Guardian
‘Au’s novel is ... masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire—our own and other people’s.... We can sense it in the soft, patient warmth of Au’s prose, which sometimes feels attuned to truths just out of the narrator’s reach.’ — Peter C. Baker, New Yorker
‘This clever, phantom-like work eludes definition.’ — Catherine Taylor, Guardian
‘This is a powerful novel about the relationship between a mother and daughter, and the ways that geography, language, art, travel and migration can change the ways we see ourselves, as well as alter the relationships we have with loved ones with differing life and cultural experiences. Reading it –no matter the season – feels akin to walking through a hazy, dream-like mirage, in which characters, emotions and intentions are ever-so-slightly out of reach.’ — Vanessa Peterson, frieze
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“calming yet powerful”
WOW! This book was absolutely incredible start to finish, I was completely in awe of the authors ability to convey such a raw and mesmerising story in only 104 pages, I would read this over and over just to live with... More
“A meditative and provocative novel of memory, family, identity”
Cold Enough for Snow: a wonderful title, and a story which definitely warmed my heart and engaged my intellect in equal measure. This is a first person narration told entirely in reported speech. The rhythm of the... More
“An enjoyable and worthwhile novella – if a little too slight for my tastes”
This novel was the inaugural winner of The Novel Prize, which is a new, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English by published and unpublished writers around the world. As well as a... More
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