Cold Enough for Snow is a 2022 novel by Jessica Au. It won the 2023 Victorian Premier's Literary Award in the Fiction and Overall categories. Plot The novel involves an unnamed mother and daughter who live in different cities in an unnamed Western country and have not seen each other for some years. The daughter arranges for them to meet in Tokyo and travel through Japan, following her carefully planned agenda. Her mother, initially reluctant, comes only after her daughter pushes. In Japan, they visit art galleries, parks, shops, temples, and churches, and tea shops, sharing meals in small restaurants. The daughter narrates everything, and the mother's few words are only reported second-hand. The title comes from a question the mother asks before the trip because she'd never seen snow. There are occasional flashbacks in which the narrator recalls her absent sister and her family, her dead uncle in Hong Kong, and her lover, Laurie, who had accompanied her on her previous trip to Japan. She recalls the story she was told many times as a child of the love affair her uncle had as a young man, but when she asks her family about it, neither her sister nor her mother remember the story. At times, the mother does not participate fully in the daughter's plans. She waits outside a gallery while her daughter goes in, and she does not bring hiking boots, so that she cannot go on a mountain walk. Rather than changing plans, the daughter travels by train to a nearby town then does the walk back towards her mother. At one point, the mother disappears. When the daughter asks the innkeeper about her mother's whereabouts, the innkeeper claims that the daughter was staying alone. "When my mother finally appeared, she might as well have been an apparition. She came with her puffer jacket zipped up to her chin, and in the cold night air her breath came out in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit" (p. 90). Reception Reviews Cold Enough for Snow was generally well received by critics, including starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, who called it "a beautifully observed book, written in precise, elegant prose that contains a wealth of deep feeling." In a highly positive review, Tobias Grey, writing for The New York Times Book Review, noted, "Au's novel, written without any chapter breaks, deftly uses stream of consciousness to