About the Book
Tessa McWatt's breathtaking new novel explores love and endurance in the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and belonging when their own identities feel shattered.
Northern India, 2009. Four travellers disembark from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30, the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood friend, a mixed-heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston, and who carries with him a small tea canister in which he has placed his wife Amelia's ashes.
As they gather with other guests at the traditional Indian wedding, Jackson and Reema develop a reluctant, unlikely friendship that grows through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together with Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post-wedding journey to the Himalayas, seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more questions than answers.
These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less segregated. But can it be?
About the Author :
TESSA MCWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her first picture book for children, Where Are You Agnes?, is based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which also won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. She is also a librettist, most recently working with British composer Hannah Kendall. Their chamber opera, The Knife of Dawn, premiered at the Roundhouse, London, in 2016, and they are working on a new full-length opera. McWatt is also in the process of bringing John Berger's novel To the Wedding, to the screen, with award-winning film director Andrea Pallaoro. Tessa McWatt is the Course Director for the Master's in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and is on the Board of Trustees at Wasafiri. Born in Guyana, and raised in Canada, she lives in London.
Review :
“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)
