Sleep Has His House

An unhappy family returns to Britain from a hot country, filling their suburban house with the glittering hoard they brought back from their exotic sojourn. But the sadness of A, the wife, dulls the shine of their treasure. The house grows quieter, darker. Daughter B learns to hide inside it, in a night-time world whose colours are undimmed by the tense misery of the daytime household. There she sails aquamarine seas on a thistledown boat, ponders the proliferation of dream-tigers, and watches dances and celebrations from the windows of a house whose rooms multiply and change position all the time. As daylight circumstances deteriorate, with her mother's death and B's departure to boarding school, she becomes determined to take up permanent residence in the house of sleep. But there are night-time institutions determined to control her, and night-time battles to be fought, before she can come home to the dark forever. A kaleidoscopic autobiographical narrative, which speaks the language of childhood dreams which was once known to us all, this is a work of astonishing visual power and devastating loneliness.



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, also published by Pushkin Press.