Ava Anna Ada

'Every bit as gripping as it is horrifying' Ian Rankin

'So striking... like seeing our last few years through a distorted fever-dream' Lucy Caldwell

'A bleeding, sweating story' Guardian

'A bracingly original tale of lust and malice' Rob Doyle

'A work of exquisite strangeness, unsettling and arresting' Wendy Erskine

'An almost impossibly elegant evocation of violence, eroticism and derangement' Keiran Goddard

How do we live at the end of the world?

Over the course of one claustrophobic week, in an eerie, sweltering English summer somewhere in the near-future, Anna meets Ava. As Anna grieves her dead daughter, a dying landscape and a future they might have shared, Ava's mysterious pull swallows her whole. But what does Ava really want? Who are they both, really? And what are they to each other?

Braiding climate chaos, lust, politics, poetry and violence, Ava Anna Ada is a contemporary, dystopian fable, which asks us: what if the apocalypse has been and gone, and nobody noticed?

'A perverse, dark tale of shifting identities, deceit and manipulation'

Financial Times

'Shocking and uncompromising... visceral and vibrant; piercingly astute'

Miki Berenyi

Every bit as gripping as it is horrifying Ian Rankin
So striking... like seeing our last few years through a distorted fever-dream Lucy Caldwell
A bleeding, sweating story Guardian
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
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
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
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 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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