Jessica Au’s debut
novella, Cold Enough for Snow,
follows a mother and daughter as they vacation together in Tokyo in a
last-ditch attempt to strengthen their fragile bond.
I loved this slim and
stylish story, wrought in spare yet atmospheric prose that gorgeously evokes the
fraught connection between the protagonists and echoes through Au’s renderings
of the Tokyo cityscape.
There are no easy answers to their problems with themselves
and each other, but Au generously imagines their different lives and their
shared predicament of how to reach one another after so much strain.
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…
This book is a big-hearted meditation on family, on the ties
that bind—and sometimes constrict.
Bernard masterfully evokes the ambiguities
of life in the small Oregon town of Disappointment, where Lewis Yaw is
contending with some fierce private demons while raising an equally fierce
daughter, Gray. When their family’s happiness is shattered by tragedy, both Lewis
and Gray must reconceive their ideas of who they are and what, beyond
generational pain, actually makes up a family.
Bernard’s lushly evocative prose
brings their world into such sharp, sensual focus—I could practically taste the
whisky in the coffee and smell the sap running in the piney woods.
For readers of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone and David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, C. B. Bernard’s debut novel shows a father and a daughter fighting toward hope through a traumatic past.
In the town of Disappointment, Oregon, washed-up boxer Lewis Yaw makes ends meet as a fishing guide. He’s lived a life of violence, but doesn’t understand real strength until he meets Janey, who can see good in even the most damaged things—including him. When she gives birth to their daughter, Grayling, Lewis worries that he’ll mess her up as badly as his father did him. But he…
By turns hilarious,
enveloping, and utterly strange, The
Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild is a tour-de-force evocation of
life in all its rich varieties, from the tiniest micro-organism to the whole
human catastrophe, as it has unfolded over eons in an extremely tiny village in
western France.
As the novel opens, a budding ethnologist has arrived in this
village hoping to interview the locals. What he discovers about the town,
however, is that life and death are here in a very unusual relationship.
Énard’s premise is utter genius: everything that dies is returned immediately
to life again, but never very far away, so petty village conflicts left
unresolved in one lifetime reappear, albeit somewhat differently, in the next. And every living thing is subject to unsettling feelings of déjà-vu.
For three
days each year, however, the cycle of rebirth stops—those are days of the eponymous
banquet when the local gravediggers take a break from their usual grim work to
feast, drink, and reminisce. Warming as a glass of country wine, this is the book for a cold night by the
fireside.
To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn't yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the…
Set against the upheavals
of the sixties and imbued with all the gritty romance of Providence, Rhode
Island, Diane Josefowicz’s debut novel chronicles the struggles of Tino Battuta,
who has just lost his draft deferment, his fragile girlfriend Primrose, who
finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, and UFO-chasing astronomer with ties to
them both.
Each is a hostage in their own way to their families and history. Together, Primrose, Tino, and Zach discover the limits of their finite
possibilities and the fragility of their resilience. Ultimately, they
must confront the question: how much choice do we really have in the paths our
lives take?
