Anna Kavan: 8 books

A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem "One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future . . . A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s...

The Parson was not published in Anna Kavan’s lifetime, but found after her death in manuscript form. Thought to have been written between the mid 50s and early 60s, it presages, through its undertones and imagery, some of Kavan’s last and most enduring fiction (such as Ice). It was published finally,...

A classic later novel by Anna Kavan.   A largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, this daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation chronicles the subject's gradual withdrawal from the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience...

An early work from Anna Kavan strongly evoking life in England and its colonies from the early years of the century through the period following the First World War. More straightforward than her more famous novels, Let Me Alone is nevertheless fascinating for its hint of the personal stresses that was to inform much of her uncompromising storylines.

Short stories addressing the surreal realities of mental illness, from an incredible cult writer often compared to Kafka and Woolf   The tortured life of Anna Kavan brought her some reward in terms of great pieces of art. Her drug addiction bore fruit in the Julia and the Bazooka collection...

The story of a family marooned in a country house near an ugly, expanding manufacturing town of the 1920s, while yearning for life in the capital. Anna Kavan masterfully contrasts the English countryside with the brittle London life of the era.

Set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape, this is the story of Mark, a protagonist who struggles against the machinations of a hostile society and bureaucracy. Suffering at first from the persecution of his father as a conscientious objector, his life quickly comes under the...

Depicting the hopeless, emotional polarity of a young couple, this novel follows their doomed marriage spent in a remote, tropical hell. She-described only as "the girl"-is young, sophisticated and sensitive. He, "Mr. Dog-Head," is an unreconstructed thug and heavy drinker who...