Timely and timeless - a literary quest novel about trying to stay hopeful in hopeless times.

'One of the most brilliant British writers working today.' Spectator

Who 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.

Details

ISBN13: 9780571338153
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
Edition: Main
Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.5(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Joanna Kavenna's novels include Inglorious, The Birth of Love, A Field Guide to Reality and Zed. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Esquire and Zoetrope, among other publications. She was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

Reviews

Praise for Joanna Kavenna

"Joanna Kavenna. What a writer."--Ali Smith, author of Autumn

"To surrender yourself to the revelations of life and then to come back with the assertions of prose: that is the new heroism of the woman writer, and Kavenna is in the vanguard of it."--Rachel Cusk, author of Outline

"Joanna Kavenna's two decades as a writer have seen her beat a gorgeously unconventional path through a plethora of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood to economic inequality, and from travelogue to academic satire to technological dystopia."--A K Blakemore, the Guardian

Praise for Seven

"Sparkling, audacious."--Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

"The most brilliant novel I've read in ages, part academic satire, part philosophy of AI and gaming, all hubris-puncturing wisdom worn with such levity that I was cackling from start to finish."--Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

"[Kavenna] is a writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions. It is encouraging that there are those who still follow the pellucid postmodernism of Italo Calvino."--Stuart Kelly, Spectator

"Philosophical concepts and dizzying speculations on the nature of reality have always featured in Kavenna's novels, but here she ramps up the comedy, interleaving erudite playfulness with characters who are as believable as they are eccentric."--Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"Thoroughly pleasurable."--Camilla Grudova, the Telegraph