Diamond Snow
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Coach House Books
Publishing:13th Nov '25
£13.99
This title is due to be published on 13th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From an innovator of autofiction comes a meditation on grief, care, Buddhism, and artmaking.
'This is a story. It is a story about someone accompanying another to the last gate.'
Years ago, Kristjana Gunnars took her husband back to his home in Oslo to die. Through the dark, cold days, she tends to his needs as she feels her own self disintegrating. Later, as she looks back to this slow departure of the man she loved, she weaves together threads from her own life, reflections on the thoughts of Gautama Buddha, discussions of Renaissance art, and considerations of contemporary artists.
Engaging with thinkers as varied as Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Derrida, Henry David Thoreau, and Ursula K. Le Guin, Gunnars — one of the earliest practitioners of "autofiction" — crafts a new kind of hybrid text, with elements of memoir, lyrical essay, Buddhist teachings, poetics, art theory, and meditation.
The Silence of Falling Snow is a deep dive into grief, the way we circle around it, dipping in and out of the pain, finding comfort in art and philosophy and religion where we can. It’s an intellectual cabaret, a Buddhist primer, and a pointillist portrait of grief – above all, it’s the consoling and invigorating reflection we need in this moment.
"What do we know about what we don't know? What are we willing to not-know about what we think we know? Kristjana Gunnars has always been a writer willing to write in between and through genres to find her way into the bewildering space of true inquiry. She invokes Agamben's description of that shocked gaze in figures of murals from Pompeii as a figure for the writer confronting the literally "unspeakable": human experience of the profoundest grief. Using a range of touchstones, including films, literature, painting, sculpture, theology, philosophy, the history of the city of Oslo and the ancient Pali canon of Buddhist teachings, as well as a searing interrogation of trauma and tragedy in her own life, Gunnars confronts, interrogates, and illuminates the excruciating relational networks between grief and the creative life." – Kazim Ali, author of Indian Winter
"In her quietly powerful "anti-memoir" Kristjana Gunnars refuses "to give a description of feelings and events." She sets out to write a "book of snow" and succeeds." – Martha Bailie, author of There is No Blue
Praise for The Scent of Light:
”These novels are meant to be experienced, not just in language, but in their rhythms, in their interruptions and silences, in their structures and patterns and shapes of thought … These books do not merely depict life nor tell about lives lived by characters outside the writer or the reader. They are themselves alive. And in them a reader comes to life.” – Kazim Ali, from the introduction
”Gunnars questions what writing accomplishes when memory and emotions are fleeting, in her sophisticated omnibus of autofiction and literary criticism.” –Publishers Weekly
”I was smitten with the simple, lyrical ruminations on Kierkegaard and Cixous, being a 'fickle unfaithful reader,' window shutters and obituaries, all against a backdrop of heated arguments with her lover.” – Marcie McCauley, Chicago Review of Books
”Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age.” – Dashiel Carrera, Rain Taxi Review of Books
ISBN: 9781552455081
Dimensions: 209mm x 133mm x 15mm
Weight: 299g
304 pages