Jessica Au

Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, an elegant and subtle exploration of the mysteries of our relationships to others

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 New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form.

Cold Enough for Snow

Dora Tominic

Maybe it's good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.

sundus

Cathy Trình

Sarah Christine Gill

On the mountains, I knew I was taking longer than I should. It was getting dark and everything ran, streaming towards the ground. And yet, even in my exhaustion, there was too a kind of sweetness. I thought of Laurie and of our many conversations about children. My lecturer had said to us once that parents were their children's fate, not only in the way of the tragedies, but in many smaller, no less powerful ways as well. I knew that if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter.

The last train was in forty minutes. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket over my hands and wrapped my arms around myself as I sat on the bench to wait. Eventually, I got up and bought a bottle of sake from one of the vending machines. It was clear and cold, tasting at first of alcohol and something vaguely sweet, before evaporating into nothing. 

Novel Ideas

 Maybe it’s good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy. 

 I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting.

anastasia

Back then, I had wanted every moment to count for something; I had become addicted to the tearing of my thoughts, that rent in the fabric of the atmosphere. If nothing seemed to be working towards this effect, I grew impatient, bored. Much later, I realised how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything.

 I tried, and failed, to imagine her first months there. Had she been homesick? Had she been awed by the streets, the brick and weatherboard houses, so different to her own home? Had she been worn out not by the big changes, but, as is often the case, by countless smaller ones- the supermarkets that were so well stocked, but where you could not buy glass noodles, or the right kind of rice; the homes where porridge was something plain and tasteless, made with oats and milk instead of with thinly sliced scallions, bamboo shoots and black, hundred-year eggs; the roads where the people shouted at her from the cars when she crossed the street, for reasons she could not yet understand; the bank teller unable to understand her near-perfect, colonial English?

In those moments I thought nothing, or if I thought at all it was unnameable. These moments never lasted; they were gone as quickly as they had come, so quickly I could never be sure that they had even happened. And then had to be on my way.

Cold Enough for Snow quotes

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