Published in 1946, Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Anaïs Nin's extraordinary Cities of the Interior sequence, the project she considered her true literary achievement.

While her diaries have long overshadowed her fiction, this is Nin at her most ambitious: abandoning conventional plot in favour of a fluid, psychological prose concerned with creativity, eroticism, female friendship and the shifting architecture of the self. The result is a novel that sits somewhere between modernism, surrealism and prose poetry.

Centred on a circle of artists and writers loosely inspired by Nin's own Parisian milieu, the novel explores love, dependence, possession and artistic becoming through a series of overlapping consciousnesses rather than a single narrative voice. Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller and other figures from Nin's world echo through its pages, but the novel transforms biography into something dreamlike and symbolic. An essential book for readers of Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras or Hélène Cixous, and for anyone interested in twentieth-century experimental writing that places women's interior lives at its centre.

Swallow Press paperback edition. Light shelf wear and age toning to the wraps with minor creasing and a small mark to the front cover; binding is sound and the interior remains clean.