AustLit

'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)