The Snow Line

Old and young. White and brown. Male and female. British. Indian. Other.

Four strangers arrive in India for a wedding. Together, they climb a mountain - but will they see the same things from the top?

Londoner Reema, who left India before she could speak, is searching for a sign that will help her make a life-changing decision. In pensioner Jackson's suitcase is something he must let go of, but is he strong enough?

Together with two unlikely companions, they take a road trip up a mountain deep in the Himalayas, heading for the snow line - the place where the ice begins.

But even standing in the same place, surrounded by magnificent views, they see things differently. As they ascend higher and higher, they must learn to cross the lines that divide them.

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 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 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