The Snow Line

“Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line reveals life in overlapping panels: consciousness, memory, scenes of violence and of untenable beauty, ‘everything dangerous enfolded into everything else.’ Her prose has Michael Ondaatje’s el­liptical exactitude, Jane Gardam’s terse confidence, but it accumulates, on behalf of her characters—a young woman and an old man, friends—a singular, lingering effect. The Snow Line is a small marvel.” —Padma Viswanathan, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist for The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

“An exceptional, riveting read. Tessa McWatt’s rare gifts never fail to enthrall me.” —Irenosen Okojie, author of Butterfly Fish

“Vivid, rich, and melodic. Layers of images, memories, and facts ask questions of connections, accountability, and desire—political and personal—and how we meet the complexities that make us. A beautiful read!” —Olumide Popoola, author of When We Speak of Nothing

“Tessa McWatt’s writing is tender, unforgettable, utterly precise. Like performing surgery on a peach.” —Leone Ross, author of This One Sky Day

“Tessa McWatt is one of our greatest living writers. The Snow Line, her new novel, is a profound meditation on love, ageing, and what it is to be a woman of mixed racial identity and culture. Profoundly moving and epic in its scope, this book provides us with wisdom and reckoning on today’s world, one that is ecologically fragile and only just coping with a pandemic. Like all mature writers, McWatt’s range of reference is vast and her depth of understanding of humanity plunges us into depths we all long to inhabit. She writes her characters with such intimacy we are thunderstruck by the book’s final pages. I closed this book and shed tears.” —Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

“A profound meditation on the music that strangers in a place can make together, and on how the music of a strange place can get inside us, and change us forever. I loved the journey the book takes us on, revisiting some of the geographies readers will remember from The Far Pavilions, while the echoes of King Lear provide an undercurrent of nature’s aloofness, its potential for violence.” —Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

“Tessa McWatt deftly draws together characters, place, ideas. . . . McWatt is a writer who tackles race and identity with great nuance, and from a very broad reach. . . . The confidence and subtlety of The Snow Line suggest that she has done a lifetime of thinking and reading about structural injustice.“ —The Guardian

“Tessa McWatt has constructed a moving epic that rises from intimate, complex character portraits written with tenderness and precision.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

“At its core, Tessa McWatt’s The Snow Line is a book about belonging. . . . [McWatt] is masterful in her prose. . . . [T]here’s something in each character for every type of reader. . . . A meaningful story about all the things that make us unique, and all the things that make us decidedly different.” —Indian Link (AU)