Ice

In a land devastated by war, a nameless narrator pursues an elusive white-haired woman in the clutches of a government official known only as 'The Warden'. Neither will give her up, but an ecological apocalypse is indifferent to their rival claims. As a terrifying wall of ice continues its incursion over the land, freezing everything in its path, it seems that only the white-haired woman is resigned to the fate of the world.

About the Author

Anna Kavan (1901-1968), nee Helen Woods, was born in Cannes - probably in 1901; she was evasive about the facts of her life - and spent her childhood in Europe, the USA and England. Twice married and divorced, she began writing while living with her first husband in Burma and was published under her married name of Helen Ferguson. In the wake of the collapse of her second marriage, she suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns and was confined to a clinic in Switzerland; she emerged from her incarceration with a new name - Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone - an outwardly different persona and a new literary style.

Her first novel in this guise was Asylum Piece, and it achieved for her a certain recognition. She was a long-term heroin addict and suffered periodic bouts of mental illness, and these facets of her life feature prominently in her novels and short stories. She died in 1968 of heart failure soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novel Ice.