National Network for Equitable Library Service

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.