Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow

Jessica Au is a writer based in Melbourne. Her debut novel is 2011’s Cargo. Her latest novel, Cold Enough for Snow is the inaugural winner of the Novel Prize, which will see it published worldwide and translated into fifteen languages.

Cold Enough For Snow begins in transit; the narrator has arrived in Tokyo and awaits her mother’s arrival on a separate flight. They are on a train station travelling to a gallery; moving from a Metro line to a suburban line and then  walking through familiarly unfamiliar streets. As the move together the narrator is always conscious of her mother’s presence, testing out their proximity in space as well as time as she thinks back to the near and more distant past.

Cold Enough For Snow’s narrator is searching for something on this trip. She reflects on her mother’s youth in Hong Kong, paralleled with her own Australian upbringing. She wonders at her education that has shifted her perspectives away from her mother’s.