Joanna Kavenna SEVEN with Sarah Franklin

Seven

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.

Joanna Kavenna

Joanna Kavenna grew up in Britain, and has also lived in the US, France, Germany, China, Sri Lanka, Scandinavia, Italy and the Baltic states. She is the author of several critically acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, Come to the Edge, A Field Guide to Reality and Zed. Her novel Inglorious won the Orange Award for New Writing, and her novel The Birth of Love was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Joanna Kavenna's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The New York Times and many other publications. She was named as one of the Telegraph’s Best Writers under 40 in 2010 and as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. She has held the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College Oxford and the Harper-Wood at St John’s College Cambridge.

Sarah Franklin

Sarah Franklin has worked for literary agents and publishing houses in the UK, the US, and Ireland. She has worked across fiction and non-fiction for the trade and academic markets, and her sales and marketing work has taken her from Alaska to Australia. She has worked on a freelance editorial basis with best-sellers to first time self-publishing authors and taught at the Oxford University Creative Writing summer school.

She is also a judge for the Costa Short Story Award and the founder and host of Short Stories Aloud.