A Scarcity of Love
First published in 1956, A Scarcity of Love follows a young woman whose life is bent around the absence of maternal warmth. Her mother, beautiful and self absorbed, treats her daughter as a rival and an inconvenience, and the novel charts the long emotional cost of growing up unloved. Anna Kavan writes in spare, exact prose that gives the book the feel of a fable as much as a domestic story. Set across England and continental Europe, it moves between hotels, marriages, and uneasy attempts at adult life. The novel sat largely out of print for years before being recovered by later readers who recognized in it the same chilly clarity that runs through Kavan's better known work, including Ice.
What you might want to know about A Scarcity of Love
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A coldly beautiful midcentury novel about a daughter shaped, and damaged, by a vain and unloving mother.
Stylistically yes in its spare prose, though A Scarcity of Love is a realist family story rather than a slipstream fable.
It can be. The emotional climate is chilly and the central relationship offers little comfort.
A Scarcity of Love was written by Anna Kavan.
A Scarcity of Love is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
