He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl” with silver hair. In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control.

A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.' - The New Yorker

'One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future. I feel very passionate about it, as you can probably tell.A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem Just the most magnificent book.hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece. One is Anna Kavan.she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot. Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. Serious, evocative and surprising, unique in its obsessive images of encroachment - Christopher Priest strange, unsettling and harsh * Guardian * One can only admire the strength and courage of this visionary - The Timesīrutal, addictive and extremely entertaining. One of the most terrifying postulations about the end of the world.

Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision - J. One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. This ice is not psychological or metaphysical ice here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner's.

Astonishes with poetic brilliance * Sunday Telegraph *

Ice novel anna kavan