Too Cold for Snow

A paid assassin called Krink loads up on viper-spit to tackle some uber-thugs; the governor of a prison ship introduces his inmates to haute cuisine; a farmer wakes up after an avalanche in north Wales to find he’s the last man alive. The stories in this zany new collection range freely, almost chaotically, from the taiga region of northern Russia to the depths of despair. They are fuelled by a high octane imagination and an uncommon zest for language. A thrilling collection from a stunningly original voice. A journey in stories through a fabulous and fascinating fictional new world.

About the Author :
Jon Gower grew up in Llanelli Wales and studied English at Cambridge University. A former BBC Wales arts and media correspondent, Jon has been making documentary programmes for television and radio for some thirty years. He has eleven books to his name, in both Welsh and English. They include An Island Called Smith, about a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay, which gained him the John Morgan travel writing prize, and Uncharted, novel set in Buenos Aires, Oakland, California and Cardiff which was described by Jan Morris as 'unflagging and unfailingly inventive.' His latest book is The Story of Wales, which will accompany a landmark BBC series. Jon is currently a Hay Festival International Fellow. He lives in Cardiff with his wife Sarah and two daughters, Elena and Onwy.

Review :
"Gower's tales possess a primal, almost savage formality that's far removed from the calmer precisions and interiority of the mitred short story. They are also exhilarating and lush and knowing and in all ways bespeak authenticity." Richard Ford Jon Gower is an award-winning travel writer and documentary maker who is also a prolific story-teller in both languages. It is clear from this collection that his observation and knowledge of all sorts of corners of Welsh society and landscape are coupled with a tremendous zest for language and a bizarre imagination. Like one of his characters, he is a deviser of fireworks ‘with a flair for timing’. His opening sentences can be irresistible: ‘It was the time when an avalanche tore through Rhydycu...scattering winter hares before it...’ (‘White Out’). ‘Krink was the only contract killer working out of Gwynedd.’ from the story ‘Mission Creep’. His language is rich, inventive and brave. It evokes extremes of sensation, especially of taste, from the epicurean banquet in ‘Bunting’, the ‘Jade-web soup with quail eggs and bamboo-pith fungus’ served on a prison ship (‘Taste Bud Alert’) even to the ‘white taste’ of the meat in ‘The Pit’ where an entombed miner eats his own severed arm. The collection, though written over several years, has recurring motifs (birds, snow, food, snakes) which bind it together. Gower takes Welsh stereotypes – lonely bachelor farmer, rugby hero, tough miner – and subverts expectation, comically in ‘A Cut Below’, poignantly in ‘White Out’, ‘Marigolds’ and ‘Estuarine’ or horrifically in ‘The Pit’. This last, while a sort of local ‘monster tale’, is also perhaps an image of south Wales literally and figuratively undermined, first by the pits and then by their dereliction. ‘T.V. Land’ has both gothic horror and satirical comedy, painting a vigorously scabrous picture of contemporary Cardiff whereas ‘Sheerwater Nights’ is a gentle account of a charmed summer on Bardsey Island. Gower brings off an extraordinary juxtaposition in his opening story (‘Bunting’): a bravura description of indulged power and a tenderly empathic description of helpless fragility, both persons isolated and waiting for death, bound together by an imagined nightingale. Perhaps informed by his travel writing, the positive, transcendent power encountered in the natural world is manifest in a number of the stories. Jon Gower’s writing suggests that no one and nothing is ‘normal’ or predictable. Middle-aged Welsh drunks can skate like Torvill and Dean and you might meet an Amazonian shaman in Llandudno Junction. They are so strongly flavoured and diverse in tone that not all the stories will appeal to all readers but this is a writer who embodies that vision MacNiece had when he wrote ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think’ and felt ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.