In store now! Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Winner of the Inaugural ‘Novel Prize’ from Fizcarraldo Editions, New Directions, and Giramondo.
A mother and her daughter travel to Tokyo. Along the canals and through the white corridors of art galleries, in restaurants and through typhonic rain, the two walk and talk. In the course of their conversations, they attempt to reconnect with one another, to the art they’ve seen, and to their diasporic cultural heritage. Questions abound, however: who is speaking to us, mother or daughter? Why the need for such an extraordinary pilgrimage?
Jessica Au’s short, spare, and utterly breathtaking novel asks these questions and more with a clarity of prose not seen since David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Heartrending relationships, an unsparing visual eye, and a poet’s ear for prose mark Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (her first novel in almost a decade) as a literary event. A trove of wisdom and peaceful observation, filled with subtle prose and deep characterisation, Cold Enough for Snow hums with mystery.
Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Paperback £9.99
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, 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, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world. Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by Fitzcarraldo Editions, New Directions (US) and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.
Blurb lifted from publisher.
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
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