Ice

Reviews / Votes

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 Mieville A raw, brutal tale set in a frozen post-nuclear dystopia... addictive and extremely entertaining * Guardian * 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 * TLS * Serious, evocative and surprising, unique in its obsessive images of encroachment -- Christopher Priest 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 -- Frank Tallis Brooding, mysterious...a fascinating marriage of the Goth novel with science fiction * Publishers Weekly * What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world * Granta * Ice is ambitious, unforgettable, and one of a kind. It demands to be experienced * The Millions * A writer of intense imagination.... Slippery, bizarre, and meticulously written.... A gripping and uniquely strange work of science fiction * Kirkus * 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 -- Jonathan Lethem * New York Times * She is De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister... [Ice is] unique...its incantatory powers move it beyond the scope of science-fantasy -- Brian Aldiss Feels like tracking your self through a dream made of crushed codeine and glass * Vanessa Roveto *