Ice

by Anna Kavan, Jeff VanderMeer (Foreword by)

Overview

** FEATURES A NEW FOREWORD BY JEFF VANDERMEER, author of Absolution and the Southern Reach series **

“A haunting story of sexual assault and climate catastrophe, decades ahead of its time” – The New Yorker

This hallucinatory classic about the hunt for a white-haired girl, through a frozen, post-apocalyptic landscape has been celebrated by everyone from China Miéville to Patti Smith

Anticipating climate fiction and the New Weird literary genre, while garnering fans from Doris Lessing and J.G. Ballard to China Miéville and Patti Smith since it was first published in 1967, this fantasia about predatory male sexual behavior during an apocalyptic climate catastrophe reads as though author Anna Kavan had seen the future.

Ice is slowly covering the entire globe; as the glacial tide creeps forward, the fabric of society begins to break down. Through this chaotic landscape, a nameless narrator hunts for the white-haired girl he once loved - or perhaps wishes to annihilate. Battling a powerful enemy known only as the Warden, he travels through nightmarish and ever-shifting scenes, where the object of his obsession remains constantly just out of reach. She is guarded by the Warden and by a cruel older woman who wishes her ill – but each time the narrator seems poised to rescue her the encroaching ice wreaks violence on her fragile body, or his own base nature sends him hurtling onward in his kaleidoscopic pursuit. Again and again the girl appears, but inevitably she eludes him.

This dystopian classic, the last book Anna Kavan published in her lifetime, renders her apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence in unforgettable, propulsive, oneiric prose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805330998
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Series:	Pushkin Press Classics
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224

About the Author

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the 1967 publication of Ice, her most celebrated work.

Editorial Reviews

Fog and ice and torrential rain dominate this surrealistic novel, blanketing an icicle-like woman from the man who cannot clear his eyes of her image. Occasionally he glimpses her skeleton, fossilized in snow. Twice he stumbles up a mountain to a house where she is guarded by the dictator at whose side she rides in state, at whose headquarters she lives in a bare, padded room, waiting to be assaulted. The obsessed suitor pursues her over a rainswept ocean to a country menaced by nuclear war and an encroaching glacier. Later, he finds her on a beach whose dunes have become ice castles, where the waves are petrified stalagmites. They flee in a car that is now their world, deriving warmth and peace from each other. Only at the end does it become clear that both are aspects of the same self, and that the agony, the blinding light, the uphill climb, the burly guards and the frantic, headlong, aimless hunt are fragments of a drugged nightmare. This last of British writer Kavan's books to be published in her lifetime is lashed with urgency and pulsates with an atmosphere of dread. Foreign rights: Nat Sobel. October

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kavan's 1967 hallucinogenic end-of-the-world novel follows two men's search for a girl as waves of ice threaten to destroy the planet.

Library Journal

"Ice is her best novel: a sustained and extended metaphor for the descent into, and traverse of, the ice-laden world of the addict . . . a marvel of descriptive, chilling writing, rich in action and introspection." —Christopher Priest


"Entering this haunting realm, the reader will crave to plunge deeper into her metallic and poetically surreal universe." —Patti Smith


"A classic, a vision of unremitting intensity which combines some remarkable imaginative writing with what amounts to a love-song to the end of the world. Not a word is wasted, not an image is out of place." —Times Literary Supplement


"One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision." —J G Ballard


"Astonishes with poetic brilliance." —Sunday Telegraph


"One of the most terrifying postulations about the end of the world . . . one can only admire the strength and courage of this visionary." —Times


"To say it is Kafkaesque or sci-fi would be to minimise a true classic." —New Statesman

From the Publisher