Joanna Kavenna is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love, A Field Guide to Reality and Zed. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the LRB, the New Scientist, the Guardian and the New York Times. In 2008 she won the Women's Prize for New Writing, and in 2013 she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.

Praise for Joanna Kavenna

"Joanna Kavenna. What a writer."--Ali Smith, author of Autumn

"To surrender yourself to the revelations of life and then to come back with the assertions of prose: that is the new heroism of the woman writer, and Kavenna is in the vanguard of it."--Rachel Cusk, author of Outline

"Joanna Kavenna's two decades as a writer have seen her beat a gorgeously unconventional path through a plethora of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood to economic inequality, and from travelogue to academic satire to technological dystopia."--A K Blakemore, the Guardian

Praise for Seven

"Sparkling, audacious."--Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

"The most brilliant novel I've read in ages, part academic satire, part philosophy of AI and gaming, all hubris-puncturing wisdom worn with such levity that I was cackling from start to finish."--Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

"[Kavenna] is a writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions. It is encouraging that there are those who still follow the pellucid postmodernism of Italo Calvino."--Stuart Kelly, Spectator

"Philosophical concepts and dizzying speculations on the nature of reality have always featured in Kavenna's novels, but here she ramps up the comedy, interleaving erudite playfulness with characters who are as believable as they are eccentric."--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"Thoroughly pleasurable."--Camilla Grudova, the Telegraph

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Pub date: 2026-07-14

Length: 320 pages