The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel from Virginia Woolf.
It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and confront grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival.
Rather than telling the story through conventional plot, Woolf creates a sequence of voices. The six characters speak in soliloquies, their thoughts rising and falling like waves as childhood becomes adulthood and the self is shaped by memory, loss and other people.
A modernist literary classic about consciousness, individuality and community, The Waves is one of Woolf's most daring and moving works. It is a novel of interior life, friendship and grief, written with...
Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob’s Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One’s Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.
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