Welsh by family, with Scandinavian ancestry, Kavenna was born in Leicester[1] and spent her childhood in Suffolk and the Midlands as well as various other parts of Britain.
It combines history, travel, literary criticism and first-person narrative, as the author journeys through Scotland, Norway, Iceland, the Baltic and Greenland.
Along the way, Kavenna investigates various myths and travellers' yarns about the northerly regions, focusing particularly on the ancient Greek story of Thule, the last land in the North.
[3] Themes of the country versus the city, the relationship between self and place, and the plight of the individual in hyper-capitalist society recur through both Kavenna's novels and some of her journalism.
She has written for The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, among other publications.
[5] Her first published novel, Inglorious, which appeared in 2007, alludes to classics of urban dislocation such as Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Saul Bellow's Herzog.
It gradually becomes clear that this society has taken to forcibly sterilising women after an environmental apocalypse, to control population numbers and demands on depleted resources.
The novel is a dark comedy, yet it also makes a serious point throughout, about the iniquities of hyper-consumerist society and the free market notion of ceaseless growth as an inevitable good.
[13] Kavenna's fourth novel, A Field Guide to Reality (2016) imagines a parallel version of Oxford, where a professor has created a "manual for fixing existential angst;"[14] a vast compendium of philosophical thought through the ages.
Kavenna has suggested that the novel was partly inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story "The Garden of Forking Paths", and by contemporary debates about theories of everything.