The Seas
£8.70£9.50 (-8%)
“The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you’re newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell…” Maggie Nelson
“[It] blew me away because of the beauty of the language . . . I found myself highlighting about 85% of the book for the language. It is so beautifully written” Jodi Picoult
Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid.
True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend.
With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.
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Additional information
| Publisher | 1st edition (6 Sept. 2018), Corsair |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 208 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1472154231 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1472154231 |
| Dimensions | 12.4 x 1.6 x 19.8 cm |
by neverendings
Beautifully written and haunting tale of a girl growing up in a town, in the ‘Far North’, which is best known for its phenomenal rate of alcoholics per capita, and who may or may not be a mermaid.
The supernaturally inflected, often dream-like story describes her troubled friendship with a local war veteran (and alcoholic)and their attempts to make sense of their lives and perhaps to find some way out of their situations. More of a novella than a novel, and perhaps more of a modern fairy tale than a novel, The Seas leaves a long-lasting and powerful, if hard to encapsulate, impression on the reader’s imagination and own dreams.
by natalie palmer
The unnamed narrator believes she is a mermaid. She is also in love with war-damaged Jude who holds himself apart from her. According to legend, the mortal who will not marry a mermaid will be killed. She does not want to kill Jude, but words have a way of winning…
The lyrical language of `The Seas’ was a blessed relief after the prosaic prose of some of my other recent reads. The rhythm lilts like the sea, and there is some wonderful imagery throughout. Is the narrator really a mermaid or does she just feel the yawning absence of her father? Will her grandfather ever complete his painstakingly typeset dictionary? Will Jude ever succumb to her `charms’? This book is so beautifully written that the answers are almost immaterial, but so long as you are willing to suspend belief, this is a fable to savour. A welcome break from the vapidity of the mainstream.
by Beach Books Blog
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the book as it was something different and I was intrigued as to how it would be played out. However it was quite slow going and I was never really sure why the main character was so into Jude. I liked lots of the imagery and randomness/quirkiness but it just didn’t seem deep enough and I just wasn’t left feeling satisfied or desperately seeking someone to tell to read it. So after alternating positives and not so positives for a few sentences there I would say : get it if you need something to read (how I often end up with random things!) and you are happy to read something a little unusual with no huge expectations of grandeur.
I need something else to read now… I got this and the Tigers Wife and need more books (or local library to stock something more current than 1976 releases). Happy reading.
by Bookness
this is a beautiful book written with poise and intelligance. The story contiually flirts with a magical element that is never truly explained but is utterly believable and the use of language, poetry and construction of meaning and words reflects the authors obvious intelligence.
However, i was dissapointed with the end. Too me it felt like Hunt ran out of steam and was unsure how to end her novella and so, like a lot of authors, finished her story with an open end which was a dissapointing to me but maybe thats because i am a person who demands all the answers!
I would, however, deffinately recommend this book as it is wonderfully composed and executed.
by Beach Books Blog
Narrator is a 19-year-old girl, a protagonist with a witty tomboy’s voice, living in a remote, alcoholic seaside town in North America. Girl lives with her mum, who longs for New York, for the life she didn’t have, and with her grandfather, a typesetter who works on a dictionary and floods girl’s mind with strange words and phrases. Her dad has disappeared eleven years ago, and the girl is convinced, he has returned to the ocean. “You come from the water,” dad has told her, so she starts to believe that she is a mermaid, and soaks in her bathtub for hours.
Girl is in love with an older man (her feelings are so intensive, she even imagines one night giving birth to his head). His name is Jude, and he is returned from Iraq as a distracted man. Is it possible for a mermaid to be with a mortal man? In the middle of the book Jude melts and becomes a puddle of water (and she drinks it up), the girl is accused of murder, sent to jail, but someone helps her to get out, leaving wet footprints for her to follow.
“The Seas” is a debut novel, written by American writer Samantha Hunt. It was published in 2004, and has been reissued many times, including last year. Dave Eggers, author of “Where the Wild Things Are”, has said about “The Seas” that it is “one of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I’ve read in years,” and I couldn’t agree more. Plot and lines bend in my hands; unpredictable, loaded, flooded. You become an alert reader. The pages start to drip, so wonderfully wet is this book.
When the girl brakes out of jail and goes with her mum to the ocean to swim in the big waves, water is made out of words and phrases, “I pick out ‘laughing’ and throw it at her”, and my imagination tickles.
by Jess S
A beautifully layered, intricately textured, and poetic novel about trauma and the forms that it takes. The Seas tackles subjects as diverse as war, abandonment, suicide, alcoholism, love, fear, and loneliness and yet unites them lovingly and gently. It is, in turns, hopeful and fraught, tender and strong, exquisite and appalling. As much as I adore reading, it’s rare that I’m moved or surprised; this novel did just that.
by Owlbear2008
A strange and haunting short novel, where lines between reality and fantasy are blurred. Compelling, dreamlike prose that pulls you along on the sea-tide that threatens to claim the narrator before her story is told. The writing is bold and original and will stay with me for a long time.
by Miss Mina
Sad, beautiful allegorical tale. Fine writing style, some beautiful lines. A perfect book to curl up in bed with while the wind in the trees sounds like the sea.