Jessica Au (original) (raw)
Cold Enough for Snow
A daughter and a mother travel to Tokyo in autumn. They walk along the canals at night, 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, and what claim we have to truly know another’s inner world.
About
Jessica Au has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller. Her novel Cold Enough for Snow (2022) won the inaugural Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, with translations in nineteen languages. It won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.