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There is nothing else like it . . . This Ice is
not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness
of childhood
has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory
as the Ancient Mariner’s.’ – Doris Lessing
In this haunting and surreal novel, the
narrator and a man known as ‘the warden’ search
for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear,
apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and
is being governed by a secret organisation. There is destruction
everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together
with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory
quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino
hair.
Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the
best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary
and innovative novel has subsequently been recognised as
a major work of literature in its own right.
WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY CHRISTOPHER PRIEST
‘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
‘Kavan’s 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 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.’ – The TImes
‘Ice is her [Kavan’s] 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, novelist and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner
‘To say it is Kafkaesque or sf would be to minimise a true
classic.’– New Statesman
ANNA KAVAN, née Helen Woods, was born in Cannes
— probably in 1901; she was evasive about the facts of
her life — and spent her childhood in Europe, the USA
and England. Twice married and divorced, she began writing
while living with her first husband in Burma and was published
under her married name of Helen Ferguson. In the wake of the
collapse of her second marriage, she suffered the first of
many nervous breakdowns and was confined to a clinic in Switzerland;
she emerged from her incarceration with a new name — Anna
Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let
Me Alone — an outwardly different
persona and a new literary style. Her first novel in this
guise was Asylum Piece, and it achieved for her a certain recognition.
She was a long-term heroin addict and suffered periodic bouts
of mental illness, and these facets of her life feature prominently
in her novels and short stories. She died in 1968 of heart
failure soon after the publication of her most celebrated
work, the novel Ice.
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