Joanna Kavenna – författare

As heard on BBC R4s Start the Week, 'hilarious, insightful and supremely intelligent writing''What a writer.' ALI SMITH'Endlessly inventive' THE TIMES'Thoroughly pleasurable' DAILY TELEGRAPH'One of the most brilliant British writers working today.' SPECTATORWho decides the rules of the games we play?In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI.Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, Seven is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world.

'Fun and erudite' Sunday Times'Snort-inducingly funny' Daily Mail'One of the cleverest books you'll read this year' TelegraphEvery system, however immaculate, has a few little glitches.The latest in domestic tech should have predicted that businessman George Mann was about to murder his family. But instead it crashes and leads to the wrong man being caught and punished.Are there gremlins in digital giant Beetle's ubiquitous wearable tech, talking fridges and Dickensian droids? Have they been hacked, or is something even more sinister going on?With the clock ticking philandering Beetle CEO Guy Matthias, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and secretive hacker Gogol each try to uncover the truth in a darkly funny and horribly recognisable world only days ahead of our own.'Witty and horrifyingly relevant . . . Full of dark humour and refreshingly frank social commentary with a distinctly Orwellian flavour.' Scotsman

Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace.

Vienna1865: Dr Ignaz Semmelweis has been hounded into a lunatic asylum, ridiculed for his claim that doctors' unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. The deaths of thousands of mothers are on his conscience and his dreams are filled with blood. 2153: humans are birthed and raised in breeding centres, nurtured by strangers and deprived of familial love. Miraculously, a woman conceives, and Prisoner 730004 stands trial for concealing it.London in 2009: Michael Stone's novel about Semmelweis has been published, after years of rejection. But while Michael absorbs his disconcerting success, his estranged mother is dying and asks to see him again. As Michael vacillates, Brigid Hayes, exhausted and uncertain whether she can endure the trials ahead, begins the labour of her second child.A beautifully constructed and immensely powerful work about motherhood that is also a story of rebellion, isolation and the damage done by rigid ideologies.

Cassandra White is a woman on a mission. Her Lakeland farm may be falling apart, but at least she's escaped the madness of modern life. But when her valley is invaded by bankers buying up second homes, she's determined to put up a fight. What begins as a hare-brained scheme with a few unruly locals soon has the whole community taking up arms - and, before she knows it, Cassandra's leading a revolution...

'Smart, strange, coping with death through Light' Margaret Atwood'Extraordinary, wise, funny, adventurous' A. L. Kennedy'So utterly startling and inventive, it's almost an act of resistance' Miriam Toews'I couldn't put it down. A cult following seems certain' Literary Review'Refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely' Guardian'Opts to push the boundaries of what the novel is' Telegraph'A comic metaphysical thriller' Scotland on SundayIn this darkly ironic novel - a quest for truth, a satire, an elegy - Joanna Kavenna displays fearless originality and wit in confronting the strangeness of reality and how we contend with the death of those we love. Beautiful, ethereal drawings by Oly Ralfe illustrate this haunting journey through time, space and human understanding.