Seven

By Joanna Kavenna

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

"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

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 the head of the Society of Lost Things, Theodoros Apostolakis. Fortunately Apostolakis isn't lost but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful ancient 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571338151
• ISBN13: 9780571338153
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 320 Pages