Ava Anna Ada
by Ali Millar
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Pub Date 18 Jan 2024 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2024
Orion Publishing Group | White Rabbit
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Description
The between days were days of pure white heat.
Summer is swelling around the village. Heat is surging, people are whispering about a great hungry wave, and in the garden, Anna is kicking her dying dog on the grass.
But someone is watching her. The girl. Ava.
Outside, the brutal summer blisters on. Inside, over the course of one claustrophobic week, Anna and Ava become caught up in their own world. Become swallowed by each-otherness. But what does Ava really want?
As faces fray and secrets splinter, the past casts the present anew, and Anna and Ava are forced to reckon with who they truly are. Because who we are, Ava Anna Ada warns us, is not always the same as what we are to each other.
Braiding climate chaos, lust, poetry and violence, Ali Millar's debut novel is a contemporary fable against images and their enduring hold on us. Attuned to the knotty texture of reality, Ava Anna Ada asks us to confront the way things look in the dark - and what happens when what is buried comes into the light.
Advance Praise
‘Kay Dick’s They meets early Iain Banks or Ian McEwan in this novel of a near-future family meltdown. Every bit as gripping as it is horrifying.’ Ian Rankin
'A work of exquisite strangeness, Ava Anna Ada is unsettling and arresting. It moves from character to character, page to page, with beguiling relentlessness. Ali Millar's writing is full of dark richness and fevered heat, but also cool stringency in its exploration of grief and femininity.' Wendy Erskine
'Tense, ruthless and fevered, Ava Anna Ada is a bracingly original tale of lust and malice amidst dementing heat, general unravelling, and the late nightmares of a screaming planet.' Rob Doyle
'AVA ANNA ADA is both brilliantly stylish and horribly unnerving... an almost impossibly elegant evocation of violence, eroticism and derangement. A weird, furious, fucked-up fable.' Keiran Goddard
'Shocking and uncompromising, but effortlessly and unpretentiously so, Millar's writing is visceral and vibrant; piercingly astute in rendering the inner thoughts and raw emotions of her protagonists, unearthing diamonds of humanity from the mire of brutality.' Miki Berenyi
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781399613491 |
| PRICE | £18.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 272 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Cat A, Bookseller
"We didn't see the line we were crossing then. That's the problem with lines; they're impossible to see until after."
Anna has lost her child. Ava has lost her innocence. When they meet it is both beautiful and ugly.
This is a story pack with ideas and words so cleverly crafted it will subject you to feelings you did not think you could possess. I'm not a writer so it is difficult for me to put well into words just how beguiling this book is. It packs menace and bewitches as it delivers prose which tricks and treats in a most satisfying way. A story that is determined to stay with me as I cannot stop thinking about Ava. My word, Ali Millar is one heck of a writer and storyteller.
Dariia D, Reviewer
before you read this book, please-please-please, check the trigger warnings!
I can't even begin to list them all, scared of missing something!
now, that we're done with an official part... this book is fucked up!
it's fucked up and you either love it and enjoy every part of it, like I did, or chug it away and pray.
I cried, I screamed, and sometimes I even felt happy. which is an emotion I don't particularly associate with this book.
remember the craziest black mirror episode you've ever seen? double it. now you have Ava Anna Ada.
your scariest nightmare? triple it. now you have Ava Anna Ada.
it's a mommy issues universe filled with people trying to seem better than they are, chasing high numbers on Value Meters.
the book is full of different concepts like The Screen, The Wave, and The Spit, so it took me a long time to learn how to concentrate on the book properly. you miss a passage and you don't understand what the heck is happening.
it's delusional, it's a bad trip, it's hard to understand and come to terms with.
my manager at work asked me what this book is about and I couldn't answer it. you can't explain this book with a couple of sentences, you can't answer this question without going on an hour rundown of all of the events. I can't talk about this book to someone who hasn't read it.
it's a masterpiece.
thank you NetGalley for providing me with a free e-copy of this book. despite this, my review is completely honest.
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