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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.There is nothing else like it ... This ice is not psychological ice 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.
The Times
One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.
The New Yorker
Ice is Kavan's best novel: a sustained and extended metaphor for the descent into, and traverse of, the ice-laden world of the addict ... a marvel of descriptive, chilling writing, rich in action and introspection.
Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach "Land of a Thousand Dances": she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.
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.
- Jeff VanderMeer,
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
- China Miéville,