'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

'One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future' - New Yorker

Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice.

Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

With an introduction by Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige and The Inverted World.

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 publication of Ice, her most celebrated work.



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 publication of Ice, her most celebrated work.



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



One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.



Ice is 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.



Anna Kavan's astonishing works are dispatches from a strange and urgent dream. Ice is at once expansive and claustrophobic, mysterious and epiphanic. To read it is to be changed



A raw, brutal tale set in a frozen post-nuclear dystopia... addictive and extremely entertaining



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



Serious, evocative and surprising, unique in its obsessive images of encroachment



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



Brooding, mysterious...a fascinating marriage of the Goth novel with science fiction



What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world



Ice is ambitious, unforgettable, and one of a kind. It demands to be experienced



A writer of intense imagination.... Slippery, bizarre, and meticulously written.... A gripping and uniquely strange work of science fiction



Though Ice is always lucid and direct, nothing in it is simple, and it gathers to itself the properties of both a labyrinth and a mirror... What makes this not only possible, but also riveting and unforgettable, is Kavan's meticulous, compacted style... The book has the velocity of a thriller yet the causal slippages associated with high modernist writing like Beckett's or Kafka's



She is De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister... [Ice is] unique...its incantatory powers move it beyond the scope of science-fantasy



Feels like tracking your self through a dream made of crushed codeine and glass