Eagle's Nest

An artist’s sense of reality deteriorates as he seeks an elusive Administrator in this feverish, Kafkaesque novel from author of the cult 'slipstream' classic Ice.

“Astonishingly avant-garde even to the contemporary reader.” —The Paris Review

A British take on Kafka’s The Castle, this hallucinatory novel following an artist’s progressive unravelling is a surreal exploration of individualism and authority.

A nameless painter is working in creative isolation, under factory conditions amid a crowd of vapid typists. On discovering a note praising his work and inviting him to meet a mysterious Administrator, he decides to abandon his post and follow this lead to the remote mansion at Eagle's Nest. In this castle-like outpost, he meets blank-faced employees and wanders through networks of strange halls, yet the Administrator remains elusive and the painter's grip on reality grows ever shakier.

Exploring the shifting territory between the concrete world and the world of dreams, or, as Anna Kavan thought of it, that “second secret existence” of the psyche, this mind-bending novel questions the ultimate reality of personal identity and that of existence itself.

Unsettling and paranoiac, Kavan's fourth novel remains both a striking work of fiction at an oblique angle to everyday life and always distinctively her own. A key work to join her cult dystopian classic Ice, Eagle’s Nest is another powerful study of obsessive alienation in vertiginously beautiful prose.