In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden"" search for an elusive girl in a frozen, post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world in this hallucinatory quest-novel. Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right. ""Her stories are...rich with a fresh kind of peril.""-The New York Times. ""A writer of such chillingly matter-of-fact, unself-pitying vigour.""-The New Yorker