This collection of fifteen stories from the cult author of Ice examines war and mental illness from her signature surreal point of view. Inspired by Kavan's own experiences nursing traumatized Second World War soldiers and as a patient in various asylums, these pieces communicate the claustrophobia and isolation of life amidst conflict or caught in the gears of an institutional machine - but also the stunning beauty of physical experience, as her cast of outsiders find themselves pulled back into the world despite its hostility.In the title story, a young man living in an asylum must navigate the often unreadable reality around him, taking cues from malevolent flowers and inhumanly brisk nurses, as we are left to wonder whether the cure harms more than the disease. Outside the asylum grounds, institutions still exert terrifying power, as an unnamed refugee tries to navigate a Kafkan bureaucracy to escape a war-ravaged metropolis in 'Our City', and is distracted from the hopelessness of the task by the beauty of silvery barrage balloons and young women at their windows. Humanity goes to war with nature, too, in 'The Gannets', a brief, disturbing story that predates Daphne du Maurier's 'The Birds', featuring a band of impoverished children engaged in a horrific game with unnaturally predatory seabirds.At times cleanly modernist, at others ornately strange and dream-like, Kavan's writing is always propulsive, powered by the tension between the menace closing in around her characters, and the incomparable loveliness of the strange world they inhabit.



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 available from Pushkin Press.