Seven — Joanna Kavenna

Timely and timeless — a literary quest novel about trying to stay hopeful in hopeless times.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."One of the most brilliant British writers working today." — Spectator