I dread Boxing Day. It's the day winter really starts. It's easy to feel tidings of great joy when town is full of shoppers and gaudy decorations, but once Christmas Day is over, we're looking at at least eight weeks of perpetual cold, freezing fog and chilling credit card bills while we wait for spring to arrive. That's why my seasonal read is ideal; brutal, addictive and extremely entertaining.

Ice came out in 1967 and was the last of Anna Kavan's books to be published in her lifetime. It won the science fiction book of the year after being nominated by Brian Aldiss. He has since admitted that he didn't really think it was SF, but thought the award was the best way to encourage more people to read her work. His plan worked: Ice is by far the best known of Kavan's books, and I adore it.

The story follows three characters as they struggle against one another and almost certain annihilation. An ice shelf, brought about by some sort of nuclear war, is engulfing the world – Kavan's pun on the cold war may not be subtle but it is terrifying. The landscape is bleached; snow uniforms the landmarks and smothers the towns, cities and dilapidated buildings. Roads are blocked and the waterways of the world frozen solid, hampering the unnamed narrator as he pursues a nameless "ice maiden", as brittle as Venetian glass, with long white hair. She's being held by her husband, "the warden", a high-ranking military man who, with an army of obedient and bullying administrators, polices the country.

Kavan doesn't often name the characters in her books, instead giving them descriptive titles or nicknames. In Ice, countries, places, buildings and roads are also anonymous, adding to the sense of instability and uncertainty; we are completely lost in an oneiric dystopia without a single signpost to orientate us or show us the way out. The narrator is supposed to guide us but he slips into daydreams and hallucinations and we don't know what to trust or believe. It's not many pages into the book that we realise that this isn't a story about characters negotiating a war-torn country, but rather about the narrator fighting his paranoid, panic-stricken mind as it threatens to overcome him. This isn't a plot spoiler; in fact, it's almost impossible to give a spoiler to this book. Its meaning shifts with each reading.

I periodically reread Ice because I love the writing and the uneasy feeling it gives me – like reading a really good ghost story. But I also come back to it time and again because I think it tells the fascinating story of Kavan's 40-year relationship with heroin. The similarities between the white snow in the story and the powdered form of the drug I'm sure aren't coincidental.

I was once told that Kavan's love affair with heroin began when she was prescribed it for a sports injury at the time when it was administered as a painkiller in a glass bottle with a pretty label. She soon became wholly dependent on it, and when it was criminalised in the 1950s, was so worried about running out that she stockpiled it. When her body was found in her London home in 1968, it's rumoured that there was enough heroin in her flat to kill the entire street. She suffered from deep, debilitating depressions which caused her to spend time in asylums, but believed the drug allowed her to write, and that writing helped her manage her illness. I see her need for the drug mirrored in the narrator's desperation to reach the ice maiden. The story's winter weather clogs up the roads and hampers the narrator in his quest, but he continues, believing that once he has the maiden with him, all will be well.

That's my seasonal read. It's not heartwarming, it doesn't have a single picturesque landscape or sleigh bell in it. It's strange, unsettling and harsh, but that's why it's ideal. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to reading what you think.