RaveThe Guardian (UK)The plot is simple; \'deceptively\' so, as some reviews have noted: mother and adult daughter visit Japan, see the sights, take in art and food, go home. What we hear of their conversation is quotidian and understated, at frustrating odds with the narrator’s pressing hunger for connection ... What links these apparently undirected reminiscences is a preoccupation with care ... Au’s calm, unrelenting focus would be hard to take over a longer book – but this novella is graceful and precise. Like the narrator fine-tuning the aperture on her Nikon camera, Au seems to say, we have to choose our scale, what we pay attention to. The narrator, hunting for deeper significance, is shadowed by the possibility this choice might just be random ... Melancholy detachment seeps into all this perfect composure – an anxious sense of being outside the moment ... Cold Enough for Snow is filled with meticulous observation ... Au has mentioned her taste for \'subverting narrative expectation … open endings, scenes in which nothing happens yet everything happens\'. Cold Enough for Snow is exactly this, a book of inference and small mysteries. The stories, memories and images Au puts on the table escape easy conclusions ... Aesthetic, opaque, endlessly uncoiling.
