A mother and daughter reunite in Tokyo, meeting from abroad to walk the city’s canals during quiet autumn evenings, take shelter from typhoon rains, and share intimate meals in tucked-away cafés. They explore galleries filled with modern art, exchanging words on the weather, horoscopes, clothes, objects—on family, distance, and memory.
But subtle uncertainties linger. Who is truly speaking—just the daughter, or someone else entirely? And what lies behind the quiet surface of this elliptical, possibly even spectral, journey?
At once an elegy and a meditation, Cold Enough for Snow gently probes the limits of intimacy and understanding. It asks whether we can ever truly know another’s inner world, what dimensions hold space for love, and whether language itself can bridge the emotional distances between us.
‘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 is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. Cold Enough for Snow won the inaugural Novel Prize, run by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, and is set to be published in eighteen countries.
Physical Info: 5.08 x 0.67 x 7.72 inches | Paperback