Anna Kavan was one of the greatest unsung enigmas in 20th-century British literature. Born Helen Ferguson, a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life, she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any English female writer of the last 150 years.
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. Faithful to her obsessions, she pursued her dreams of ice and heroin to the end. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision. - J G Ballard; Kavans grasp of the futuristic dimension of her form is uncommonly good. She predicted not only the neutron bomb but also the nuclear winter ... Ice should have been filmed by Lindsay Anderson. - British Science Fiction Association Astonishes with a poetic brilliance as hard, cold and glistening as the creepingly imminent ice-age it describes. - 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. - The TImes Ice is her (Kavans) best novel: a sustained and extended metaphor for the descent into, and traverse of, the ice-laden world of the addict. This description does not prepare you for what the book contains: it's a marvel of descriptive, chilling writing, rich in action and introspection. - Christopher Priest, novelist and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner To say it is Kafkaesque or sf would be to minimise a true classic. - New Statesman
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. Faithful to her obsessions, she pursued her dreams of ice and heroin to the end. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision. - J G Ballard; Kavans grasp of the futuristic dimension of her form is uncommonly good. She predicted not only the neutron bomb but also the nuclear winter ... Ice should have been filmed by Lindsay Anderson. - British Science Fiction Association Astonishes with a poetic brilliance as hard, cold and glistening as the creepingly imminent ice-age it describes. - 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. - The TImes Ice is her (Kavans) best novel: a sustained and extended metaphor for the descent into, and traverse of, the ice-laden world of the addict. This description does not prepare you for what the book contains: it's a marvel of descriptive, chilling writing, rich in action and introspection. - Christopher Priest, novelist and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner To say it is Kafkaesque or sf would be to minimise a true classic. - New Statesman
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