Description
Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves
The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival.
Weaving together soliloquies from the novel's six characters, Woolf delicately and expertly explores universal concepts such as individuality, the self, and community. A novel still as poignant today as it was when written.
Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf's response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.
Trade ReviewClear, bright, burnished, at once marvellously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry * New York Times *
As a reader, as a writer, I constantly return, for the lyricism of it, the melancholy, the humanity * Independent *
It is so different from any other novel I have read that description is pointless. Suffice to say that it creates an entirely new way of writing about what goes on in the human mind and how those minds interact with one another -- Mark Haddon * New Statesman *
