Tre personaggi: un io narrante alla continua ricerca di una fantomatica ragazza albina e un antagonista, ora marito, ora carceriere. La vicenda si svolge attraverso continui disallineamenti spazio-temporali, in un romanzo inclassificabile, attraversato da un continuo passaggio dallo stato di sogno a quello di veglia, accerchiato dall'avanzata di un ghiaccio che è reale, forse dovuto a un disastro nucleare, ma che insieme simbolizza l'avanzata dell'inevitabile, la droga che prende terreno, l'abitudine a una fine che si fa ogni giorno più ineluttabile. L'autorità e il potere maschile vengono annotati attraverso un linguaggio che si sdoppia: mentre il cacciatore modella la sua preda, Kavan, scrittrice consapevole, modella il cacciatore, scolpendo lui e lei nel ghiaccio. Prefazione di Claudia Durastanti.

A daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation, Sleep Has His House charts chronologically the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence and youth are described in what Kavan terms 'night-time language' - a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations. The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams but that these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark.
Anna Kavan maintained that the plot of a book is only the point of departure, beyond which she tries to reveal that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly illuminate. She spent the last ten years of her life literally and metaphorically shutting out the light; the startling discovery of Sleep Has His House is how much these night-time illuminations reveal her joy for the living world.

The beautiful 'glass girl' Luz is pursued from one imaginary country to another by Luke, whose love for her becomes a pathological obsession. Luke is as bewitched, too, by the Indris, singing lemurs whose magical harmonies he encounters in a tropical forest of pellucid charms. The lemurs have no enemies in their jungle world 'where intelligence and affection were cherished, and destruction and cruelty had no place'.
Luke has chosen his wandering life of exile to escape his own shortcomings and failure in human relations. And he wants to protect Luz, estranged from her sadistic husband Chas. Luke himself reveals shades of latent sadism and becomes dependent on tablets that induce horror, shame and ecstatic excitement.