Ava Anna Ada

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.

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
So striking... like seeing our last few years through a distorted fever-dream. The precision and delicacy of the violence is uncanny Lucy Caldwell
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
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
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
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
Love and lust are the dark forces that intertwine within Ava Anna Ada. Millar is a rare talent and has created a hypnotic, profound and mesmerising novel Ewan Morrison
Ava Anna Ada is as brilliantly queasy as Nabokov's final novel, Look At The Harlequins! ... This is an unforgettable and unflinching book. Even though there are moments of ghastly comedy it manages to end with a moment of sublimity. But the sublime, as Blake described it, something overwhelming that reminds us of our mortality, of the 'terrible uncertainty of the thing' -- Stuart Kelly The Scotsman
A perverse, dark tale of shifting identities, deceit and manipulation Financial Times
A bleeding, sweating story Guardian
A unique and fiercely original debut novel The Herald
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
'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
Love and lust are the dark forces that intertwine within Ava Anna Ada. Millar is a rare talent and has created a hypnotic, profound and mesmerising novel Ewan Morrison
'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
'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

Born in Scotland and now living in London, Ali Millar is an author and journalist. Her debut memoir, The Last Days, was released by Penguin Random House to widespread critical acclaim in 2022. Ava Anna Ada is her debut novel.

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