Kavan continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatments for heroin addiction and in her later years in London lived as a virtual recluse. She enjoyed a late triumph in 1967 with her novel "Ice", inspired by her time in New Zealand and the country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica. The original manuscript was titled The Cold World. When her publisher Peter Owen sent Kavan his initial response, neither rejecting nor accepting her text, he described it as a cross between Kafka and The Avengers. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim. It is her best-known novel, still puzzling the reader for its strangeness and nowadays rather introduced as a slipstream novel than a science fiction one.