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the complete review - fiction

Seven

by
Joanna Kavenna

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : intriguing variation(s) on the philosophical novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "It's hard to suppress the urge to search online for the answers while navigating Joanna Kavenna's latest mind-bending novel Seven. (...) Dizzying speculations on the nature of reality have always featured in Kavenna's novels, but here she ramps up the comedy, interleaving erudite playfulness with characters who are as believable as they are eccentric. (...) The Gordian knot of existence proves easy to resolve if you remember to think outside the box. And to have fun. This novel abounds with it." - Suzi Feay, Financial Times
  
  
• "Kavenna’s philosophical rigour is leavened throughout by a generous sense of humour. (...) Seven is not so much a novel about philosophy as it is a novel about philosophy’s limits -- its structure is episodic, and across its length a recurrent contrast develops between the over-refined abstraction of the discourses our narrator is subjected to and the cosmic sublimity of the natural world that they move through and experience. (...) I’m sure there will be plenty of readers with whom Kavenna’s elliptical style will disagree, and for whom the rewards of this weird little book won’t be worth the wade through the weeds. But personally, once I stopped trying so desperately to understand it all, Seven became a very pleasing read " - AK Blakemore, The Guardian
  
  
• "Although it is witty, ingenious and says some sharp things, there is an undertow of melancholy. Games are oases of meaning in an indifferent world (.....) Kavenna captures this exquisitely. She is a writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions. It is encouraging that there are those who still follow the pellucid postmodernism of Italo Calvino rather than the more rambunctious Angela Carter." - Stuart Kelly, The Spectator
  
  
• "At first, I disliked it intensely. (...) (O)nce you get past the dinner party, Kavenna tames the quirkiness, replaces it with serious questions – war, technology, wealth – and provides a thoroughly pleasurable, as well as philosophically demanding, read. (...) It must be admitted that there’s some cringe-worthy writing, too, which should never have been allowed to remain in the final draft. (...) But, in all fairness, they don’t spoil the fun. Think of them as wrong moves, wrong but not fatal, in an otherwise well-played game." - Camilla Grudova, The Telegraph
  
  
• "(I)t's hard to summarise what it's about because there's so much going on. (...) All this is delivered in a style of almost insane specificity: every encounter and scene is meticulously detailed with all the names and characteristics involved. To summarise a paragraph would take the full length of the paragraph. New people, places and organisations fire out of the page at us and accumulate. It's exhausting to keep up with. (...) So what does it all add up to ? It's frustratingly hard to say: the book is a head-scratcher and a pleasure by turns. " - John Self, The Times
  
  
• "(A) story that effervesces with as much energy as the Great Geysir. (...) Kavenna's reframing of current anxieties around the harmful effects of AI on writers and artists raises important questions about the intersection between science and philosophy, the impact of digital technology on human thought. In her use of hybridity -- the novel as a philosophical treatise, as a radical inquiry into the nature of being -- Kavenna suggests that the form is no longer fit for purpose as a mere vehicle for narrative; now, more than ever, the novel must learn to reinvent itself. " - Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The narrator of Seven is a young person who apparently completed a degree in philosophy, the novel beginning with them taking a position as researcher for the: "great and terrifying Alda Jónsdóttir", an eminent Icelandic philosopher now working in Oslo, on a project called: "Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box or TOTBATOTB for short".
       The narrator -- never identified by name or gender (apropos of something else, but fitting to everything about them, the narrator at one point notes: "I was neither one thing nor another") -- is a pretty hapless and often overwhelmed sort; s/he notably often gets lost or confused about routes and time (though, admittedly, eventually winding up where they're supposed to go). Much of 'Box'-philosophy also seems beyond the narrator, though s/he gamely plays along -- eventually even tasked by Alda to finish the book Alda long works on but, to the frustration of her publishers, can't seem to complete.
       An actual game also figures prominently -- the 'Seven' of the title, played on a spiral board. The narrator is quite good at it, having often played with their father (though never beating him), and s/he encounters a variety of other players along the way here as well, including nine-time world champion Eleni Hikaru Jones, recent dominating -- indeed: "unbeatable" -- player Ashok Deo, and perennial runner-up (and European champion) Indrek Laar. Laar eventually develops a Deep Blue-like Seven-playing computer programme, which is pitted against Deo -- and then another programme is developed specifically to beat that one .....
       Over the course of the novel we are introduced to several different forms of Seven: while it is a classical game, with finds of Seven-boxes from antiquity, no one can be certain about how it was actually played and the rules under which it is now played were only relatively recently codified -- and there is continuing disagreement about them, with alternative ones also introduced, and the game being played under a variety of them. Several forms of 'The Rules of the Game' are presented here.
       The narrator is also dispatched by Alda to Greece, to spend time with Theódoros Apostolakis -- another Seven-afficionado (and also a poet and a dentist) -- who has a connection to Eleni Hikaru Jones. Apostolakis is also particularly interested in lost things, and works on a 'Catalogue of Lost Things', the Fanouropiton; eventually, he also establishes a museum of lost things.
       At one point, the narrator is fired by Alda -- for being too polite. She complains: "You have issues with pathological politeness" -- and observes also that: "Your politeness is a form of lying" (surely a rather big nudge to the reader that we night be dealing with an unreliable narrator ...). Eventually, s/he is brought back in the fold -- indeed, as noted, ultimately entrusted with completing Alda's great work -- but either way, s/he is adrift much of the time (not least also in traveling far and wide through Europe, often long stretches by bus).
       Predictably presented in seven chapters, Seven is an intriguing philosophically playful work. Perspective matters -- as one of the basic concepts, of 'thinking outside the box', suggests -- and the different sets of rules under which Seven is played also reïnforce the idea of how much ways of seeing/playing matter. If the narrator is perhaps too hapless (or at least certainly too unconvincingly intellectual), there are also some fine character-portraits and stories here, especially around Apostolakis, Eleni, and Eleni's father, 'Moose'. (The narrator is also distant from certain of the events, even in the present-day; in this and many respects s/he -- or at least the fact that they are narrating -- feels a bit pointless.)
       Seven is -- as it is surely meant to be -- somewhat elusive. A not untypical scene, near the end, has the narrator report: "For a while we argued, but it was uncertain what we were arguing about", and readers might feel the same way about much in the novel -- but that's also part of the point. There's also the fact that Seven not only has different sets of rules under which it can be played but is also partially a game of chance -- the roll of the dice determines some of the moves and hence outcomes -- and thus also defies 'pure reason(ing)'.
       Seven both calls for and plays with 'thinking outside the box' -- and readers open to taking that leap should find quite a bit to enjoy here. And even aside from the philosophical aspect, the human stories are quite well done -- even if, as a whole, much here feels somewhat unstructured, the novel feeling like one (but far from the only) possible variation of the game(s) that Kavenna is playing.

- M.A.Orthofer, 27 May 2026

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Excerpt

• The Guardian
• Publishers Weekly
• The Writes of Womxn

• Official site

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• Index of titles beginning with numbers under review

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About the Author:

       British author Joanna Kavenna was born in 1974.

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© 2026 the complete review

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