[Thank you the NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the Digital ARC. Late review based on notes from my reading journal.]

Beautiful, slow, melancholic, and magical -- it felt as if I was floating alongside the mother and daughter as they walked through Tokyo. It also asks a tough, poignant question: how much does blood truly connect us? Is it a purely biological link, or is there something spiritual thread that tugs parent and child together -- one that can be buried or cut or burned through life experiences and interpersonal tragedy? Are we strangers connected by memories and lives shared in the same way visitors may find familiar things in a foreign land?

This tale is a better experienced than explained, so I encourage anyone with even a passing interest in this book to read it and embark on the journey Jessica Au leads her characters on themselves.

I really enjoyed this quiet contemplative novel and will look for future books by this author. A mostly serene story of a mother - daughter trip to Tokyo that highlights the main characters inner life and attention to sensory detail.

This book is a masterpiece. It is written so beautifully.
The storytelling is amazing. Excellent characterisation.

I absolutely loved this meditative, atmospheric, soothing walk with these two women - loved the narrative, the characters, the medication, the atmosphere, the take on the relationship between a mother and a daughter. One of my favourite!

Lovely novella about a mother and daughter's relationship as they go on holiday to Japan. The narrative is told through the mundane motions of every day life. You can read this in a afternoon and feel a great calm come over you.

A contemplative and quiet piece of autofiction that revolves around a daughter’s trip to Japan to reconnect with her mother and focus on a relationship that has become distant. They visit quiet spaces – art galleries and museums – and speak little while contemplating ceramics and fabrics.

Interspersed with the trip are memories of life in Hong Kong before the family migrated elsewhere (possibly Australia based on Au’s life) and snippets of the daughter’s life as college expands her world; she develops a love of the Greek classics and moves in with her long-term partner. Such experiences have created some of the gaps between her and her mother, who grew up in rural China, that she is attempting to bridge. These gaps and the intangible presence of the mother who drifts in the narrative like a memory or a ghost makes it unclear if she is really on the trip or whether the daughter simply imagines her there or feels her presence. Au meditates often on the nature of memory and the way it differs for people, the way we can remold the past and this ambiguity adds extra poignance to the spare, precise narrative style.

One thing I immediately noticed from Cold Enough for Snow is the absence of dialogue between characters. Right from the first sentence, it’s a heavily sensory story with a detailed description of the surrounding environment. The main character is visiting Japan with her mother, chiefly because she has been there before, and to make her mother more at ease by visiting another part of Asia, a place both foreign and familiar to both of them. While being sensory, this novella also puts a lot of emphasis on internal dialogues within oneself as the main character roams over her memories of being told about her uncle and her mother’s early life in Canton.

As far as plots go, this novella doesn’t seem to really have any plots to me, with one topic jumping into another and lots of flashbacks. The characters seem too detached from each other. Perhaps, it has something to do with the absence of dialogues. While Gabriel García Márquez also doesn’t rely that much on dialogues, the main character in Jessica Au's novella seems to be trapped inside her own world, inhabiting a space that is oceans apart from other characters. It seems to me to be an overuse of the stream of consciousness as a literary device, albeit it also creates a meditative effect (which perhaps would resonate with some readers).

While its length is only 94 pages, it’s the kind of story that takes time to digest (and perhaps, also to reflect on). What the narrator says about her life’s story could at times sound banal, repetitive, and boring. Yet at the same time, they are also the same stuff that most people would be thinking about: family problems, growing up, the pursuit of happiness, and questioning one’s identity.

WOW! This book was absolutely incredible start to finish, I was completely in awe of the authors ability to convey such a raw and mesmerising story in only 104 pages, I would read this over and over just to live with these calming yet powerful pages.

This was a lovely story that I definitely enjoyed reading. I started it late at night and tried so hard to day up and finish it as I couldn't put it down. It was beautifully wrote and flowed so well. I loved how it was a story of mother and daughter travelling through Japan. It grabbed me from the start and took me on a wonderful journey. It had a great medium pace and almost made me feel like I was reading a true story. It was easy to connect with and I loved the two made characters they were realistic. I definitely recommend reading this book especially if you love reading quick read books .

So much praise goes out to the author and publishers for creating such a wonderful story that really kept my attention. This book had some brilliant culture that made me feel like I was in the Story. 
The above review has already been placed on goodreads, waterstones, Google books, Barnes&noble, kobo, amazon UK where found and my blog https://ladyreading365.wixsite.com/website/post/cold-enough-for-snow-by-jessica-au-fitzcarraldo-editions-4-stars either under my name or ladyreading365

In following a daughter’s trip to Japan with her mother, Cold Enough for Snow gazes into the obscurity of generational/migratory estrangement, identity, language, art, and reality itself. At the heart of this obscurity is unreconciliation. The narrator’s personal unreconciliation lies in the cultural, historical, lingual and ontological gap between her and her mother. As an artist, she recognizes the same kind of unreconciliation in art.
The novel is written in the mode of an intense presence, a multi-faceted presence that is aware of the past as well as the future. If the past is obscured by the losses that occur through migration, the future is obscured by a sense of coming grief over the inevitable death of her mother. Reading this, one finds oneself lost in the fog of the present, trapped between two unknowable lands. This is achieved through Au’s open-ended prose and her fixation on moments of obscurity. These moments—the world seen through a rainy window, or a hike through a hazy forest—externally manifest the narrator’s fixation on her own inner obscurities.
It’s a testament to Au’s writing how directly she places you into the lived reality of these contradictions. Wise enough to know that untangling these knots is not always possible or even necessary in any given present, Au instead welds the obscurities of identity and artistic meaning to depict a sense of radical presence. “Perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.”

My thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the arc.

An immersive, atmospheric read, set in Japan with themes around motherhood, migration, and connection. Great passages on swimming, walking in a snowy street, and other sensations.

An atmospheric, quiet tale that delves into the connection/lack thereof between a young woman and her mother. Au crafts Japan in such a fashion that it seems as haunting as the relationship at the book's core. The prose is quiet, and introspective, and I thoroughly adored every moment spent within its pages.

An elegant and simple novel about loneliness, isolation, mothers and daughters who have drifted apart. The story is told through several moments (and memories, flashbacks). An unnamed mother and a daughter meet in Tokyo to have a trip. The daughter lives in Aus with her partner and the mother has moved houses. They meet at a common city to embark on this trip. However this trip seems more important to the daughter than the mother. We also try to understand the relationship between the sisters in the family. The prose is dream-like and meditative. Often what is unsaid or remembered gives us an understanding of the distance between the mother and the daughter. Slim and wonderful.

I had a few download issues with the book and by the time it was sorted, the file had unfortunately been achieved. Happy to re-review if it becomes available again.

So beautifully written prose that involves moves me.A mother and daughter on a trip in Tokyo.In their quiet days of touring visiting a world off emotions memories are revealed,There is something so special in thee writing I found myself slowing my reading speed down to absorb the emotions the relationship.A wonderful book I will be recommending.#netgalley #Coldenoughforsnow.

“Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough For Snow” challenges our assumptions about what it means to uncover our stories – and ourselves.” Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker

From the Publisher
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 … But uncertainties abound. … 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.”

This is a beautiful novel that created something of an ethereal reading experience for me. Short enough to read in one sitting, and written without any chapter breaks in a stream of consciousness style, it’s a thought-provoking volume that packs an emotional punch. A slow moving exploration of emotions and memories, and identity and relationships, Au’s beautiful writing stirs up deep feelings and raises many unanswered questions.

This isn’t one of those books that you breeze through to find out what happens next but instead read slowly and carefully, word by word and sentence by sentence, as much to see what’s not being said as what is. If you’re looking for a page-turner with an engrossing plot and loose ends tidied up, this is not the book for you. But if you’re in the mood for a slower paced atmospheric study of life, family and connection that requires some patience, demands reflection and leaves things open-ended, this would be a great choice.

Au’s book was the winner of the 2020 Novel Prize, a relatively new award that “rewards novels which explore and expand the possibilities of the form, and are innovative and imaginative in style” and I think it is definitely a contender for the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist.

The narrator in this novella goes to Japan with her mother - visiting museums, cafes, temples. They chat about the narrator's childhood, their astrological signs, the meaning of life. The narrator remembers a summer housesitting for a lecturer whose house was elegant, adult, full of beautiful objects. She remembers her studies of the Classics, the time spent mastering references, her first job as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant.
The writing is lovely and I didn't mind the lack of a plot, or the long paragraphs about seemingly nothing... What I found puzzling is the overall impression of a very short and very curated vignette, where everything is dainty and beautiful and thoughtful. I couldn't help thinking of the Instagram reels encouraging you to "start romanticizing your life", or the "main character" trope.

It's not (Au) it's me...

I requested to read this as it ticked all my boxes; a mother and daughter spend time in Tokyo together, sharing meals, visiting galleries etc and talking. It also clocked in at a very slim 94 pages so I thought this might finally be a book I'd be able to 'devour' in one sitting (or maybe two ... or three - I'm a slow reader!)
But for some reason I just wasn't able to get into it. I think the fact that so little happened plot-wise meant that I had a hard time keeping track from one reading session to another.
Instead I think I will take a day to myself, with no distractions or obligations and allow myself to sink into this and give it the attention it rightfully deserves.
I have given it 3 stars on the basis that this was not the right book for me at this time.

'As we walked, I explained to my mother a little of what to expect, being careful not to give away too much detail, to leave things to be discovered.'

A mother and daughter meet up to spend time together in Tokyo, walking the streets, sitting in cafes, visiting galleries. What at first seems a simple tale develops into an enigmatic and melancholic piece, where as a reader you suspect that much more is happening behind the words. With meditations on art, motherhood and memories, this is a truly beautifully crafted short novel by a clearly talented writer.

The kind of book that will linger with you long after you have finished, a very strong 4.5 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

A transient look into a mother and daughter's delicate relationship through visceral descriptions of Japan, food and art. A brief story that packs a punch; one of my favourites of this year so far.