'A novel about the relationship between life and art, and between language and the inner world - how difficult it is to speak truly, to know and be known by another, and how much power and friction lies in the unsaid, especially between a mother and daughter.
'A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafes and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother's family in Hong Kong, and the daughter's own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken?
'Cold Enough for Snow is a reckoning and an elegy: with extraordinary skill, Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between mother and daughter, and the distance between them.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Selected as one of the Guardian Australia best Australian books of 2022
'An ex-boyfriend’s profile as he glances at the wine list of a fancy restaurant is described as being like “an ad for an expensive watch.” The stairs of a museum in an old Japanese house are “low and small, because people had once been low and small.” A garden party leaves behind “empty wine glasses on the big table, and scrunched up napkins purple on the ground.”' (Introduction(
'If travel dislodges us from our usual strictures, what might we then become? If we go together, who might we then become to each other? The by-products of travel are innumerable—new discoveries, sensations, energies, stories to tell. In Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow (2022), the narrator returns to Japan, bringing her mother, who has never visited. The novel follows the details of their trip from beginning to end—what they eat, which artworks they see, the temples they visit. But what the narrator desires lies beyond a meticulous itinerary—it’s something that cannot be planned.' (Introduction)
'Jessica speaks to Leah Jing McIntosh about digressions, internal weather, and ekphrastic thinking.' (Introduction)
'Easy conclusions elude in this slender story about a mother and daughter’s trip to Japan'
'The narrator of Cold Enough for Snow is visiting Japan with her mother. “We did not live in the same city anymore, and had never really been away together as adults,” she writes, “but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name.” Together, they explore museums and galleries, restaurants and bookshops, a cemetery, a bathhouse and a church, each place carefully chosen by the daughter “for what [her mother] might like to see”.' (Introduction)
'Jessica Au has been appearing on the Australian literary scene for quite some time now. I first noticed her work in the noughties: short fictions published in Overland and Wet Ink, stories with well-crafted sentences and engaging characters and an aesthetic that leaned toward stillness and dissociation.' (Introduction)
'Jessica Au’s novella Cold Enough For Snow won the inaugural “Novel Prize” in 2020 while still in manuscript; it’s easy to understand what the judges saw in it. Compact and terse yet flowing, both concrete and ambiguous, intimate but distant, modest yet knowing, the book manages to find universality in the careful observation of detail.' (Introduction)
'Melbourne writer Jessica Au has won Australia's richest literary award, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards (VPLAs) for her short but "masterful" novel Cold Enough for Snow.' (Introduction)
'Jessica speaks to Leah Jing McIntosh about digressions, internal weather, and ekphrastic thinking.' (Introduction)
