Anticipating climate fiction and the new weird literary genre, while garnering fans from Doris Lessing and J. G. Ballard to China Miéville and Patti Smith since it was first published in 1967, this fantasia about predatory male sexual behavior during an apocalyptic climate catastrophe reads as though author Anna Kavan had seen the future.
Ice is slowly covering the entire globe; as the glacial tide creeps forward, the fabric of society begins to break down. Through this chaotic landscape, a nameless narrator hunts for the white-haired girl he once loved—or perhaps wishes to annihilate. Battling a powerful enemy known only as the Warden, he travels through nightmarish and ever-shifting scenes, where the object of his obsession remains constantly just out of reach. She is guarded by the Warden and by a cruel older woman who wishes her ill—but each time the narrator seems poised to rescue her the encroaching ice wreaks violence on her fragile body, or his own base nature sends him hurtling onward in his kaleidoscopic pursuit. Again and again the girl appears, but inevitably she eludes him.
This dystopian classic, the last book Anna Kavan published in her lifetime, renders her apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence in unforgettable, propulsive, oneiric prose.
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Anna Kavan (1901–1968) began her career writing under her married name Helen Ferguson. It was only after a nervous breakdown that she became Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, with an outwardly different persona and new literary style. Much of her life remains an enigma. Kavan suffered periodic bouts of mental illness and long-term drug addiction—she had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and continued to use it throughout her life—and these facets of her life feature prominently in her work. She died in 1968 of heart failure, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, Ice.
Nigel Patterson, British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner, has many credits as a stage, screen, and voiceover actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish.