The world is coming to an end. In a period known as The After, on a coastal area called The Spit, Ava and Anna are waiting for The Wave. Ava, a young woman who sells sex in the woods, is obsessed with Anna: older, wealthier, an influencer and kept wife who has recently lost her daughter Ada to anorexia. Both Anna and Ava are disaffected, distanced from their broken environment and from themselves. Anna makes regular visits to an unspecified location where she asks people to beat her up “just to check I could still feel”.
The Last Days, Ali Millar’s memoir of the painful process of leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was published in 2022. Ava Anna Ada is her first novel, set in the runup to an extreme weather event which could be catastrophe or “Rapture”. The story is told in short chapters which switch and merge perspectives so the way we see things shifts. It’s cleverly unstable, offering and then taking away our sense of sympathy for the two women and the choices they perceive.
