Cold Enough for Snow

Jessica Au

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions , 2022
Genre: Novel
Pages: 104 pages

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 cafés 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.

Awards

Winner of the Readings Prize – New Australian Fiction 2022 | Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction 2023 | Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature 2023 | Longlisted for the 2023 Australian Indie Book Awards | Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023

’Slim, beautifully simple … Au’s new work … shows that she has learnt to play to her strengths.… She finds momentum in the closely observed oscillations of a single relationship.’

Baya Simons, Financial Times

‘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 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

‘Jessica Au finds poetry in meandering, slippery transitions between anecdotes, with their nebulous timelines and transcontinental trajectories.’

Los Angeles Review of Books

Jessica Au

Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. Her first novel Cargo (2011) was published by Picador and was highly commended in the Kathleen Mitchell Award for a writer under 30. She is the former deputy editor of Meanjin, and is currently an associate editor at Aeon. Cold Enough for Snow is her second novel.