Cold Enough for Snow

Cold Enough for Snow is a 2022 novella by the Melbourne-based Australian writer Jessica Au, winner of the inaugural Novel Prize. It follows an unnamed adult daughter and her ageing mother on a quiet trip through Japan, and is set for the HSC English Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

Published in 2022 and winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, Cold Enough for Snow is a quiet, formally precise novella narrated by an unnamed adult daughter who has invited her ageing mother on a trip through Tokyo and, later, Kyoto. They walk in the rain, visit a museum housed in a pre-war sculptor's home, eat in small restaurants, and talk, a little, about beliefs, children and the past. That is almost the whole of the plot: the drama is entirely internal, living in what the daughter notices, remembers and cannot bring herself to say.

Around this thin thread of event, Au loops backward into memory - a childhood bonsai, an uncle's photographs of Hong Kong, a sister's forgotten rages recalled by phone - and forward into an imagined future in which the daughter and her sister will one day clear out their dead mother's flat. Present observation and decades-old memory sit in the same calm register, so that time feels pooled rather than sequential.

The novella is also, quietly, a book about migration and inheritance. The mother grew up in Hong Kong; the daughter has grown up in a Western country, been sent to a Catholic school, and studied English literature, and she keeps finding that a foreign country returns her not to her own childhood but to her mother's. We never hear the mother speak in her own unmediated voice, never learn whether the trip means to her what it means to her daughter, and never reach a reconciliation scene. The relationship stays partly opaque by design: the experience the book hands the reader is the experience of loving someone you cannot fully know.

Cold Enough for Snow is studied in the HSC English Standard and Advanced Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences, which asks how a text represents individual and collective human experiences and the paradoxes of human behaviour - here, argued through Au's restraint, ambiguity and the unsaid. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.