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Seven
'One of the most brilliant British writers working today.' Spectator
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 Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful 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 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.
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 Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost, but everything else ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful 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 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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 15, 2026
25 people are currently reading
409 people want to read
About the author
Joanna Kavenna
20 books158 followersJoanna Kavenna is a prize-winning British novelist and travel writer.
Kavenna spent her childhood in Suffolk and the Midlands as well as various other parts of Britain. She has also lived in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States.
These travels led to her first book, The Ice Museum, which was published in 2005. It was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award in that year, and the Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2006. Described by the The New York Review of Books as "illuminating and consequential," 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. Before The Ice Museum she had written several novels that remain unpublished.
Kavenna has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford and St John's College, Cambridge. She is currently the writer-in-residence at St Peter's College, Oxford. 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 Kavenna's novels and in 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.
Kavenna is now based in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria and has a partner and two young children.
Kavenna spent her childhood in Suffolk and the Midlands as well as various other parts of Britain. She has also lived in the United States, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States.
These travels led to her first book, The Ice Museum, which was published in 2005. It was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award in that year, and the Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2006. Described by the The New York Review of Books as "illuminating and consequential," 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. Before The Ice Museum she had written several novels that remain unpublished.
Kavenna has held writing fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford and St John's College, Cambridge. She is currently the writer-in-residence at St Peter's College, Oxford. 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 Kavenna's novels and in 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.
Kavenna is now based in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria and has a partner and two young children.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 4, 2026
I don't know if it's a nascent manic epsiode but this book SPOKE to me. It is also just a genuinely brilliant piece of fiction, insanity aside. I love the kind of Nordic absurdist humour she employs here, very reminiscent of Dorthe Nors, Ariane Koch. It's done brilliantly. I will probably never forget the dinner party scene with Alda Jondsdottir's magnificent salmon dish and the terrible incident that leads to it being filled with shattered glass - a lot of the novel felt like a Bunuel film or early Yorgos Lanthimos- very cinematic....people trapped in strange rooms having a terrible time, off their nut on drinks or drugs of some sort, both hilarious and agonising to witness. I loved every single one of these odd characters, and enjoyed the ambiguous gender idenity of the narrator. Box Philosophy! Thinking Outside the Box (about Thinking outside the box)! It's a very deep novel, despite the humour, about the games we are forced to play in life and as citizens; who makes the rules? games with rules impose constraints, but should you always live within the rules? We should question everything. and look hard. ESPECIALLY at AI.
Various threads of interest converged in this books for me, the Etruscans (Fufluns and the flower of life), grief rituals, the symbology of spirals, sacred geometry in general, lost things (the resort of the Lost Weekend), healing from trauma...
'People often speak about learning experiences and especially when you're young, there's a notion that virtually everything that happens should be interpreted in this sense. Let that be a learning experience to you! I hope you've learned your lesson! But it's true that I did learn two major things from the whole salmon-based fiasco. Firstly, names are often significant. A drink called Black Death is unlikely to be very good for you. Secondly, I hadn't needed to worry about everything I was so absurdly worried about, due to the law of unintended consequences. We can be stressing ourselves senseless about possible events, striving to avert them, but then everything is demolished by an unimagined and previously unimaginable event....Then we have to start all over again, striving and hoping.'
'Did you know,' said Eleni Hikaru Jones, 'that was the original meaning of the word 'trauma' for the Ancient Greeks? A wound so deep, it never heals.'
'Talenti said he often thought about Horace when he came to this coast, especially in the winter. You know, those lines, he said:
Don't ask, we never know...
whether Jupiter gives us more winters or this is the last one,
debilitating the Tyrrhenian Sea on opposing cliffs.
Be wise, and mix the wine, since time is short: limit that far-
reaching hope.
The envious moment is flying now, now...'
'you find spirals everyhwere in the ancient world. You can't move without hitting a spiral. The whirlpool, the Gordian knot. The cycles of time, the changing of the seasons. Birth, death, growth, reincarnation. You travel through the labyrinth to the source. Then the cycle continues.'
'for while they spoke of the Himalayas, the shifting seasons in this monumental valley, how Deo's father had spent many years at the top of Saraswati mountainm how Saraswati is the goddess of wisdom. Rishi asked earnestly, if Deo had any views on the Shape of the Universe theory, the spiral galaxies - but Deo said he'd heard nothing about this. 'Rule nothing out,' he said. Deo also spoke about the unalome...'I was pretty battered...said deo. 'Then I came here and perhaps because of the monastery nearby, or for other reasons, I kept thinking about this old symbol - of a spiral that unwinds. The path to freedom. The beginning is a spiral but then the path unwinds , slowly, and finally you are released...I liked this idea of unwinding, And the idea that the path may not be straight and may not always lead in the right direction.'
Various threads of interest converged in this books for me, the Etruscans (Fufluns and the flower of life), grief rituals, the symbology of spirals, sacred geometry in general, lost things (the resort of the Lost Weekend), healing from trauma...
'People often speak about learning experiences and especially when you're young, there's a notion that virtually everything that happens should be interpreted in this sense. Let that be a learning experience to you! I hope you've learned your lesson! But it's true that I did learn two major things from the whole salmon-based fiasco. Firstly, names are often significant. A drink called Black Death is unlikely to be very good for you. Secondly, I hadn't needed to worry about everything I was so absurdly worried about, due to the law of unintended consequences. We can be stressing ourselves senseless about possible events, striving to avert them, but then everything is demolished by an unimagined and previously unimaginable event....Then we have to start all over again, striving and hoping.'
'Did you know,' said Eleni Hikaru Jones, 'that was the original meaning of the word 'trauma' for the Ancient Greeks? A wound so deep, it never heals.'
'Talenti said he often thought about Horace when he came to this coast, especially in the winter. You know, those lines, he said:
Don't ask, we never know...
whether Jupiter gives us more winters or this is the last one,
debilitating the Tyrrhenian Sea on opposing cliffs.
Be wise, and mix the wine, since time is short: limit that far-
reaching hope.
The envious moment is flying now, now...'
'you find spirals everyhwere in the ancient world. You can't move without hitting a spiral. The whirlpool, the Gordian knot. The cycles of time, the changing of the seasons. Birth, death, growth, reincarnation. You travel through the labyrinth to the source. Then the cycle continues.'
'for while they spoke of the Himalayas, the shifting seasons in this monumental valley, how Deo's father had spent many years at the top of Saraswati mountainm how Saraswati is the goddess of wisdom. Rishi asked earnestly, if Deo had any views on the Shape of the Universe theory, the spiral galaxies - but Deo said he'd heard nothing about this. 'Rule nothing out,' he said. Deo also spoke about the unalome...'I was pretty battered...said deo. 'Then I came here and perhaps because of the monastery nearby, or for other reasons, I kept thinking about this old symbol - of a spiral that unwinds. The path to freedom. The beginning is a spiral but then the path unwinds , slowly, and finally you are released...I liked this idea of unwinding, And the idea that the path may not be straight and may not always lead in the right direction.'
January 26, 2026
Part comedy, part thriller. She had be at box philosophy. It’s also delightfully European with echoes of Hesse and Fowles, but with a lot more wit and fun.
January 20, 2026
A novel of ideas, centred around a board game with a hidden history that goes all the way back to the ancient Mediterranean; a tragi-comic journey around Europe's bloody history and its hopeful if confused present.
At one point I noted "Is this 'The Magus' if the Fowles novel wasn't so massively up itself?" Well, maybe it is, with its charismatic Greek characters, labyrinths of many kinds, dark intimations of WW2 atrocities, and mind games (it's all about games, or all about the game).
I loved how European it was, moving between Greece and Scandinavia, France and Spain; the USA barely exists. Clouds on the horizon are an incoming AI that plays the titular game better than any human, but can it be beaten? And is that the real issue? Kasparov beaten by Deep Blue just affirmed that he was the best human player.
I also liked the narrator character and that as far as I could tell we never find out whether they're male or female. I'm tending towards female but I can imagine being them.
The game itself is likely based on the ancient Egyptian game of Mehen, and at the back of my mind was also Hesse's world-defining Glass Bead Game. In Seven's world the game gets outside the box and becomes a metaphor (which means 'transport,' or 'journey' and it's certainly that) for the universe itself.
At one point I noted "Is this 'The Magus' if the Fowles novel wasn't so massively up itself?" Well, maybe it is, with its charismatic Greek characters, labyrinths of many kinds, dark intimations of WW2 atrocities, and mind games (it's all about games, or all about the game).
I loved how European it was, moving between Greece and Scandinavia, France and Spain; the USA barely exists. Clouds on the horizon are an incoming AI that plays the titular game better than any human, but can it be beaten? And is that the real issue? Kasparov beaten by Deep Blue just affirmed that he was the best human player.
I also liked the narrator character and that as far as I could tell we never find out whether they're male or female. I'm tending towards female but I can imagine being them.
The game itself is likely based on the ancient Egyptian game of Mehen, and at the back of my mind was also Hesse's world-defining Glass Bead Game. In Seven's world the game gets outside the box and becomes a metaphor (which means 'transport,' or 'journey' and it's certainly that) for the universe itself.
February 1, 2026
Being gifted a book, having no preconception, and ending up totally absorbed by it is such fun! Seven is strange, playful, and philosophical book that wanders across Europe (and beyond) in search of the origins of a mysterious game, while questioning whether origins, rules, or answers are ever really the point.
Reading it soon after Clarke’s Piranesi felt oddly perfect. The two share a fascination with memory, symbols, liminality and narrative anonymity, and with how knowledge drifts and reshapes itself over time.
Kavenna’s writing moves beautifully between registers: soaring, abstract, and erudite one moment; grounded, intimate, and observational the next. At moments, it feels as if you’re on the verge of understanding everything, and then it slips away again.
What ultimately emerges is not a solution to the game, but something better: an exploration of how humans create rules, stories, and structures to understand the world, and how play itself is our oldest tool for thinking.
Absolutely loved it!
Reading it soon after Clarke’s Piranesi felt oddly perfect. The two share a fascination with memory, symbols, liminality and narrative anonymity, and with how knowledge drifts and reshapes itself over time.
Kavenna’s writing moves beautifully between registers: soaring, abstract, and erudite one moment; grounded, intimate, and observational the next. At moments, it feels as if you’re on the verge of understanding everything, and then it slips away again.
What ultimately emerges is not a solution to the game, but something better: an exploration of how humans create rules, stories, and structures to understand the world, and how play itself is our oldest tool for thinking.
Absolutely loved it!
February 2, 2026
Weird, funny, lovely. Makes you fall in love with the world anew.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews