The Snow Line

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?


Genre: Literary Fiction

"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

"Tessa McWatt’s writing is tender, unforgettable, utterly precise. Like performing surgery on a peach." - Leone Ross

"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