Ice by Anna Kavan is a hauntingly beautiful and surreal novel that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Set in a frozen, apocalyptic world, the story follows an unnamed narrator as he searches for a fragile, ethereal woman who is constantly slipping from his grasp. The narrative is dreamlike, filled with shifting landscapes and ambiguous characters that mirror the narrator's obsessive and increasingly disoriented mind. It's an unsettling exploration of desire, power, and helplessness, written with a lyrical intensity that lingers long after the last page.

Wonderful the writing was so elegant and beautiful. I adored the writing style and following this world that Kavan created

The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who follows the girl he loves after she escapes from her abusive husband. The story develops in a post-apocalyptic world filled with off-season ice and snow. The character chases the girl through different places and relationships to save her and get her away from danger. However, the girl doesn't know who to trust and keeps getting away.

The descriptions of the spaces are beautiful and immersive, even though the world is hostile and keeps the characters constantly on the move. The character is uncertain of the incoming threats, but the narrative allows the reader to feel the imminent destruction of the setting. We learn of the world through the distorted perspective of the main character, making the narrative and characters move between reality and hallucinations.

Ice feels unique and hard to categorize. Even though it has elements recognizable from other genres, it takes the reader on a journey through a reality that feels uncertain and distorted.

Thanks to Net Galley and Pushkin Press for the chance to review this new edition of Kavan's novel.

A surreal read. The narrator is obsessed with a young woman (he calls her the ‘girl’) who he is constantly looking for across the world. She’s often with another man in a violent and abusive setup, but the narrator isn’t less abusive. The world is facing a climate crisis, the ice is coming. At the same time the world is becoming more unstable, wars, violence, disruption and chaos. The scenes follow one after the after in a dreamlike or nightmarish way. It’s all a bit depressing really.

3.5. I liked aspects of this but I feel like it was trying to tackle too much as the same time. The atmosphere was well-captured.

I picked this up solely on the merits of the book cover and the publisher name - I had not heard of Anna Kavan's "Ice" before and didn't know what to expect going in to it. I'm sure, given the 1967 publication date and the heaps of praise that has been bestowed upon this book, that there's nothing new that I can add to the narrative.

Be that as it may, I definitely read this book as the author having some Cold War anxieties about mutually assured destruction and the brinksmanship of American-Soviet politics and secret government agendas. There also seems to be drug-fueled hallucinations and paranoia, as the scenes shift and blend from one to the other as the narrator, obsessed by the pale girl, travels far and wide to claim her for himself. There's also a lot of very icky real and threats of sexual violence, and the girl's utter victimization in the face of the narrator and practically any male figure in her vicinity.

There's a lot to think about in this book. It has definitely inspired me to find more to read about the life of the author, Anna Kavan.

Ice is a slipstream dystopian that was originally published in 1967. Like many of Kavan's novels, Ice contains a lot of autobiographical elements, but now they set in a surrealist apocalypse. The novel follows an unnamed protagonist as he travels to various unnamed countries to find an unnamed woman and take her back from the Warden before the world is covered by ice.

The woman is not given much characterization apart from being tiny, frail, and constantly abused. Each time she manages to escape from the abuse one of the men finds her and drags her back in. The story often switches in and out of hallucinations without warning adding to the cyclic feeling of the woman's escape and recapture. It is not always clear which scenes are hallucinations and which are real.

Ice is disorienting and builds tension and dread like few other dystopian novels I have ever read.

Hallucinatory and fragmented, Ice is a disorienting but mesmerising read. Kavan's prose is scattered, frenzied, as the apocalyptic night closes in on our hazy narrator. I can't imagine this kind of ambigous storytelling being for everyone, but if you get into the rhythm of it, it's hard to put down.

Much like the rapid freeze encroaching on human spaces in its fictional world, Anna Kavan's Ice transcends time and space. Over 50 years since its publication, the short story remains hauntingly relevant. This was my first foray into the genre of slipstream -- the literature of ‘strangeness’ --and I now realize its similarities with other genres I’ve long enjoyed (speculative fiction, sci-fi, cli-fi, dystopian fiction). What sets slipstream apart from those literary cousins is its weirdness. Weirdness, as defined by cultural critic Mark Fisher, is “that which does not belong... the joining of two things which do not belong together (2016:10-11).” Slipstream as a genre is subversive. It disrupts and unsettles what we know, evading conventional categorizations, binaries, plot devices and writing structures through its invocation of the Weird. Christopher Priest’s introduction to this latest publication of Ice is particularly helpful for novice slipstream readers like myself, as Priest usefully contextualizes this book within Kavan’s oeuvre, the wider genre, and Kavan’s own personal life. I found Priests appraisal of the novel a well-developed guide to the book. Would recommend reading it again at the end of the book to consider his points alongside your own opinions after reading. Kavan’s novella is a marquee exemplar of slipstream and the weird. In it, an unidentified man desperately searches (hunts may be a more appropriate descriptor) for a nameless girl in a frozen wasteland, as glaciers invade the last rural towns left. The glaciers seem to chase the narrator and the girl throughout the book, driving the novel forward through their rapid onset.

We think of glaciers as a physical material developed over millennia, many human lifetimes. Kavan, however, challenges our notions of temporality and solidity in her uncanny world through descriptions of the rapid movement of ice and the havoc it wreaks on humanity without much reference at all to time passing. Ice is liminal, caught between solid and fluid, but the physical ice in this book shatters traditional conceptualizations of ice through depictions of it as an unstoppable, immense force of nature. Ice was written long before climate change had entered the collective conscience. This book proves incredibly prescient in its depiction of the power and force of nature and the fragility of humanity. With many speculative fiction novels emerging now using fire, heat and warming as a plot device and an exercise to imagine and prefigure alternative realities from our own amidst climate catastrophe, I was fascinated to read a book in which ice was the central environmental phenomenon leading to destruction.

I was impressed with the uncanny similarities between the central figures of the story. The girl, who the narrator describes as pale, translucent with bright white and silver hair also exists in a liminal space for much of the book, caught between lost from the narrator and found by him. Not only is she described physically to look like the material of ice, she is also described as being cold and unmoving, giving the narrator as well as the other men who abuse and control her nothing. To give them nothing is her ultimate power and her only ability to subvert their enforced authority. Just as the distinction between the ice and the girl is blurred, the distinction between the men in the book is also eerily unclear. Aside from the narrator, the girl was once married to a husband and in the latter half of the story is held captive by a warden. We do not know much about the warden or the husband, but we see that the narrator has a strong aversion to them both. He directly explains to us his disgust for the warden is due to their similarities. They are mirror images of each other, evil to the core in their shared enjoyment of the girl’s suffering and containment. The narrator’s misogyny is palpable in his recollections of the girl and her childhood, blaming her mother for conditioning her into obedience. His pathological desire to inflict violence on the girl and his jealousy when any other men can have her instead of him is haunting. “I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds,” he says.

We know early on that the narrator is unreliable; he acknowledges, “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity for me.” He moves through the world as if it is a dream. The descriptions of his movements do not always make logical sense; they are fragmented and hard to follow. “In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.” These reflections from the narrator force the reader to frequently take a step back to consider themselves what in the writing is real, true, dream or opinion, a quality emblematic of the slipstream genre.

In total, we are left with moments of novelty and moments of familiarity in Kavan’s world, a world ravaged by nature and yet still containing fragments of social life and politics in the towns the narrator visits. Kavan’s decision to leave vague the reasoning for the social unrest described maps cleanly onto her other decisions forcing the reader to sit and consider their confusion: “It was the usual story of mistakes and muddles due to different ideologies, lack of direct contact” is all we get as explanation. It’s also all we need to understand. Kavan shows us less is more.

In total, this book is a brief page-turning thriller, one that you finish and sit with for a while. It was at once weird and uncanny and eerie. Mark Fisher writes that the genre of the Weird is a response to our being “caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces.” It feels safe to say Ice is Kavan’s response to this condition.

Ice by Anna Kavan

With the warmth of my fellow neighbors, my honeycomb castle was a sanctuary of comfort. The familiarity with daily tasks reached an unrelenting pace. However, today was different. With a squeeze of her hand, Kavan’s smoker unleashes a smoggy cloud of slipstream consciousness. Devoid of all my senses, my small wings fluttered toward an exit. Once outside the hive, majestic ice glaciers jutted out in my trichromatic periphery. My ocelli took in an amazing brilliance of a blueish tint. Through the blustery cold, I focused on plants ripe with literary pollen. As I landed on a long, frozen stem, I stashed as much as possible on my hairy legs. I wanted to share this newfound knowledge with my fellow yellow and black striped brothers and sisters. With minimal effort, I acknowledged an attempt of Anna Kavan telling a pertinent story. Men chasing women, human war escalating, and something called global climate change. Humans have a strange way of interacting with each other. There always seems to be turmoil among those in control. Treating people poorly with no reverence for their feelings. Take, for instance, the fact the two alpha males are vying for the right to dominate a poor young woman. In constant flight from these men, she leads us through war-strewn streets and the impending dangers of icebergs taking over the land. My mind grows heavy with sorrow; perhaps humanity could learn something from our bee ways.

It would be inaccurate to claim that I comprehended all the words or their subsequent intent that were written in this book. Kavan’s prophetic style was laced with beautiful passages that encouraged me to read even when lost. It is fundamentally dystopian and, as such, naturally conveys a rather pessimistic view of human nature. However, I would liken it to seeing a beautiful animal swimming below a frozen surface. Perhaps the creature is a polar bear seeking a meal; its massive form creates a natural tension within our body. We cannot dispute that this fear inspires awe and respect for its size and beauty. This story has an inherent weight that is up to our interpretation. Some will adore it just for that fact alone; others will deem it confusing and give up. I am happy I saw my way through; it was worth the investment.

Upon my short trip home, my antennae remained frozen like two glacial swords. I sighed and entered a familiarity I adored. A singular pulse of buzzing invited me inside. A house without prejudice or ego-driven mania. Upon contemplation, I should keep the story's details to myself. My intention is not to contaminate the minds of the hive's employees.

I am giving this 4 out of 5 stars; recommended!

Many thanks to Pushkin Press for the ARC through Netgalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion.

This is a novella and yet I just couldn't get into it, but I feel like that's on me. I'm just not the reader for this kind of story. I couldn't get my bearings or sink my teeth into it. Nothing was making sense to me and I appreciate that that's the style of the genre, but I don't particularly enjoy reading this kind of dream-like story that I can't grasp. If things don't make sense, I need to at least be able to connect at an emotional level to be willing to go along, but that was missing for me. I appreciate that it reads like a nightmare and it's very disorienting, which can feel disturbing and create a sense of dread that other reviews report feeling, but that didn't happen for me. I was just confused and not into it.

This is an apocalyptic novel that was unfortunately lost on me.

We follow an unnamed narrator as he searches the world for a woman he becomes obsessed with and tries to save her from "The Warden," all while the world is slowly freezing to death.

I had really high hopes for this one as I love apocalyptic stories, but this one really missed the mark for me. Apart from the lack of any plot, I found the narrator really annoying, the obsession over the woman I didn't fully understand. The way the woman had to be described as so skinny she could break about 50 million times also grated on me a lot. We get it, she's weak and vulnerable and needs saving.

The story is a little trippy, and I found myself confused a lot of the time. The narrator tells his story, but I was never quite sure what was facts and what was him hallucinating. I would have liked more from the apocalyptic side and less from this weird obsession with the woman.

I think it was written well, and there was definitely a message in there somewhere, but ultimately, it was just not a book for me as I completely missed the message it was trying to tell.

Many thanks to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for allowing me to read this repub of Kavan's 'Ice' in exchange for an honest review!

One of the most unique modes of storytelling I have encountered in the past year - for lovers of books that eat at you, make your brain hurt, and offer very little resolution.

'Ice' for all its bare, ascetic, and clinical feel, is a story riddled with violence, lust, and torment. I have to say it took me a little while to adjust to Kavan's hallucinatory prose - each time you manage to orient yourself, you are abruptly tugged away into a new, unfamiliar land.

This relentless shifting seems a fundamental part of the text, however. The narrator's restless pursuit of "the girl" allows each character to metamorphosise and shift between different roles, identities, locations.

The prime thread that runs throughout this haziness is the narrator travelling across a fatally icy landscape to find a "girl", in the clutches of a tyrannical general. Each time he locates her in a new environment, she is whisked away again. The times he does manage to secure her, it is always temporary and filled with discomfort - Kavan seems to question the male desire for ownership, especially interesting against the warfare backdrop.

The ice landscape is not static - slowly enveloping all land masses, we constantly feel on the brink of climate collapse. It is a bleak and unforgiving glimpse of the worst of humanity, humanity in crisis.

Kavan fills each section of her novel with dream-like relapses, exploring possibilities of what could have happened, before yanking us disorientedly back into what is actually happening. It becomes very difficult at times to discern what the actual plot of the book is - I think this is the point.

Parts of this were a hard read - the (not so implicit) paedophilic gaze with which we are to take in "the girl" is deeply uncomfortable. There are scenes bursting with currents of sexual aggression and violence that many (female) readers could probably do without - interestingly I think this is saved by the fact that the writer is female herself, otherwise this probably would have been unbearable.

Some wonderful and hypnotic moments that are truly spellbinding, but something didn't quite gel with me to tie this all together.

I first read Ice several years ago, as part of a university module on speculative fiction. Since then, the cryptic, slipstream narrative has stuck with me. This book remains as harsh and unyielding as the ice that encroaches around our unnamed characters, but is for me a sci-fi classic.

The world of ‘Ice’ is on the brink of apocalypse, wrought by both political conflict and environment. Amidst the panic of escaping an all-consuming ice age, we follow the unnamed narrator through ambiguous countries on his hunt for a young woman (‘the girl’ repeatedly called a ‘victim’ too) and through his violent fantasies that bully for the audience the idea that he means to save her from a third character: the Warden. This very conflict between wanting to dominate and to save is embodied by the narrator’s own admission: “With one arm I warmed and supported her: The other arm was the executioner’s”.

Kavan’s prose fools us at first into reading a simple narration of the man’s journey, but like his desires flick between violence and salvation, hallucinatory fantasies are woven between real events. As readers we are constantly forced into reassessing this narrative and decipher where reality lapsed. Almost without fail these instances revolve around the girl, fragile and ghostly. Her physical appearance is repeatedly sketched by the narrator as transparent, extremely delicate, unearthly white, like the snow all around them. Above all, she is a victim, of him and others.

For me, a book of so many layers deserves a much greater fanfare. Similar to the narrator’s dual sense of reality, Ice is both surreal speculative dystopia and a hallucinatory nod to a heroin addict’s own suffering. Re-reading confirmed this as one of my all-time favourite speculative fiction books.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Ice by Anna Kavan is a first person-POV classic climate fiction novel set when the northern hemisphere is slowly becoming covered in ice. When the warden searches for a young woman he is obsessed with, he runs into a secret organization that is governing a small nation as the world falls apart around them. But the warden only wants to find the young woman and will do anything to have her.

Some of what is said about women and survivors of emotional abuse is uncomfortable and even will be triggering for some. I think most of it is what I would expect from something written in the 60s, but it was still a bit shocking at times. There is sexual assault on the page that is unlike anything I’ve read before because it is framed around how the young woman being assaulted has a victim mindset due to her childhood abuse from her mother. The young woman being a victim and living like a victim comes up often. On top of that, the warden never feels like he’s supposed to be a hero or a good guy; it’s pretty obvious on page one that he is selfish and has an obsession and he kind of just watches things happen to the young woman and barely intervenes unless he thinks he can have her for himself.

I mention all of this because I think there are some very cool things in here with atmosphere and imagery and how every character with blue eyes is almost depicted as otherworldly but in a ghastly way. It feels almost prophetic when you look at the current state of the world. But some of the content could be a major turn-off or a reader will need to prepare themselves before diving in. I have no doubt that Anna Kavan was drawing from the world around her as she wrote the book and I do appreciate that she preserved the attitudes of the time so we can see how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

Content warning for depictions of assault and domestic abuse and mentions of childhood abuse

I would recommend this to fans of climate fiction looking for an early example, readers looking for sci-fi set in a future Earth rather than in space, and those looking for a short classic with speculative elements

The novel doesn't follow a traditional structure with a definite beginning and an end or proper cause and effect to the events depicted in it. With a fragmented narrative that doesn't bother much about linearity, with past events and hallucinations merging without any bifurcation, the plot rolls out like a fever dream. The ambiguity of time, space, and even the identity of characters may alienate readers who are only used to more structured narratives. But to those who don't mind plots that are not anchored and would love to exert themselves in something complex with a scope for multiple interpretations, 'Ice' is a treasure trove.

Terrifying and slippery, propolsive and bewildering, the book unspools like a series of difficult dreams, the narrative constantly shape shifting but yielding the same fable at the center.

I love a surreal 'post apocalyptic' novella discussing climate change and it's now... not so surreal aftermath!!!

this book was published in 1967 and it gives for so much discussion on climate change, surrealism and humanities response to a climate catastrophe. reading this in 2025 was INSANE, I felt my jaw fall to the floor due to how scary MANY of the societal attitudes and reflections on our planet was... it all felt too oddly familiar. the setting of this was so eerie and I could vividly picture everything. I did unfortunately find that this slowed significantly in the middle of the novel, despite it being under 200 pages and I struggled to connect to any of the characters which was such a shame! but the setting oh my

some quotes I adored / think need to be highlighted in our current world climate:

~ 'there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; no more violence, no war, no victims; nothing but frozen silent, absence of life. the ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet' (this was written in the 60s btw!!!!)

~ 'the moon's dead eye watching the death of our world.'

~ 'pale cliffs looming, radiating dead cold, ghostly avengers coming to end mankind. I knew the ice was closing in around us, my own eyes had seen the ominous moving wall. I knew it was coming closer each moment, and would go on advancing until all life was extinct.'

This was a really good book! it was a scary book with real issues, like abuse and climate change, and showed some real dangerous things that could happen. It was entertaining, but it was a scary dark read at the same time.


Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

What an odd book. I'm on a huge sci-fi kick now, and even though this is on a few "classics" lists, I'm surprised it's not more well-known. I think it's best to go in without knowing much about the story. The only thing I'll say is that the setting is unlike anything I've ever come across. It's apocalyptic, and believable, and creepy, and cold. Give it a go.