Анна Каван: Ice

A science fiction metaphysical thriller by a writer who has been garnering cult status

“I have always admired Anna Kavan among the few writers who dared to explore the nocturnal world of our dreams, fantasies, and imagination.”

— Anais Nin, from an unpublished Introduction to Ice

“Ice represents one of the high points of science fiction… a catastrophe novel which goes as far beyond Ballard as Ballard is beyond Wyndham, sailing into the chilly air of metaphysics. It looks sideways at its great contemporary among pornographic novels, Pauline Reage’s Story of O. Even more, it is its own self, mysterious… an enigma—like all the greatest science fiction, approaching despair.”

— Brian Aldiss

Ice was chosen by Brian Aldiss as the best science fiction work of 1967.

A brilliant and memorable novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a surreal landscape of ice and snow, the result of a nuclear disaster. The country has been invaded, it is being run by a secret government and is under imminent threat of total nuclear destruction. With the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest through the interminable and encroaching walls of ice.

Written while Kavan was addicted to heroin, it was the last of her novels to be published before she died in 1968.