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Anna Kavan

Ice

  • Ice

  • 'There is nothing else quite like Ice' Doris Lessing

    Set in a frozen world that is gradually being devastated by ever-encroaching ice, Anna Kavan's masterwork follows one man's pursuit of a mysterious silver-haired girl to the ends of the earth; to the end of everything.

    'A brutal novel of a frozen post-nuclear dystopia. Just the most magnificent book ... hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece' Frank Tallis, Guardian

    'Few novelists match the intensity of her vision' J. G. Ballard

    'She is De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister' Brian Aldiss

Penguin Science Fiction

21 Books

Anna Kavan was born in 1901, the only child of a wealthy British family. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson. During this time, she was introduced to heroin by her tennis coach in order to improve her game. She suffered a breakdown after the end of her second marriage, and was committed to an institution to treat both her depression and her addiction. She published her two best-known novels after this experience, Asylum Piece and Ice, under 'Anna Kavan', the name of a character in an earlier novel. She died of heart failure at her home in London in 1968.

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