Anna Kavan

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

The Ark Sakura

Make Room! Make Room!

A Voyage to Arcturus

Star Maker

Untouched By Human Hands

Robot

Warm Worlds and Otherwise

Black No More

Driftglass

Cat's Cradle

Fables for the Cybernetic Age

The Cyberiad

Flatland

The Colour Out of Space

The Hair Carpet Weavers

Trafalgar

Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home

Dimension of Miracles

One Billion Years to the End of the World

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

There is nothing else like it... 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.

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

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

Brutal, addictive and extremely entertaining... strange, unsettling and harsh

Ice is superbly unsettling... this novel is perfect winter reading.

Just the most magnificent book...hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece. I feel very passionate about it, as you can probably tell.

No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him... 
 
Mysterious, unnerving, and beautifully lyrical, Anna Kavan's Ice is a work of science fiction without parallel.

'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

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.

Ice

Format:

Buy the book from:

Astonishes with poetic brilliance

There is nothing else like it... 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.

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

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

Brutal, addictive and extremely entertaining... strange, unsettling and harsh

Ice is superbly unsettling... this novel is perfect winter reading.

Just the most magnificent book...hugely enigmatic, a genuine novel of the unconscious and a masterpiece. I feel very passionate about it, as you can probably tell.

About Anna Kavan

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter