Reviews

»This slim, expertly crafted and beguiling novella that flits between the past and present was the inaugural winner of the international Novel Prize. There is an absolute certainty to Jessica Au’s prose, but the evanescent story she tells—of a young woman who takes her mother on a trip to Japan, their conversations and reflections on their lives—abounds with ambiguities.«
Sydney Morning Herald

»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

»Flawed understanding, consolation, and insufficiency all infuse this compelling, unsettling novel reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts or Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. A beautifully observed book, written in precise, elegant prose that contains a wealth of deep feeling.«
Kirkus starred review

»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.«
Financial Times

»Jessica Au is a new talent to be watched.«
Romy Ash, Australian Book Review

»So calm and clear and deep, I wished it would flow on forever.«
Helen Garner, author of The First Stone

»Cold Enough for Snow ... is dreamlike, between traum and trauma, in its aethereal cadences. And if Au is striking out for herself, the essence of the move is in her patient manner: not self-restrained (as trauma might be) but self-measured (as a slow dream might be). Her prose is serenely executed: astutely and expertly.«
The Hong-Kong Review of Books

»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.«
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.«
New Yorker

»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, Harpers

»Au’s writing ebbs along effortlessly and poetically.«
The Australian

»A fascinating, touching story that becomes a meditation on the link between sensory experience and the intangibility of memory, ultimately asking how our lives can both recapitulate and diverge from those of the people around us.«
Buzz Magazine

»Cold Enough for Snow ... is a fresh venture down the road of migratory stories, ones that explore the fault lines that distance can create between members of the same family.... For all of us who are rendered far from our families by these distances, the book asks us, what can we share with our parents that keeps us tethered to them?«
The Oxonian Review