Ice

This literary science fiction classic details the hallucinatory hunt for a white-haired girl, through a frozen, post-apocalyptic landscape

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

“A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation” – Jeff VanderMeer

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.

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.