The Waves

The Waves follows six friends — Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis — from early childhood through old age, in a novel built almost entirely from their interior monologues. There is little conventional plot; instead, each character speaks in turn across a series of set pieces, punctuated by interludes describing the sun's arc over the sea from dawn to dusk, which mirror the arc of their lives.

A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks but binds the six together and whose fate shapes the second half of the book. Through its shifting, poetic voices, the novel asks what a self is when it exists only in relation to others, and how identity and memory hold together — or don't — over the course of a life.

Published in 1931, The Waves is widely considered Woolf's most formally radical novel, a book that reads more like an extended prose poem for six voices than a traditional narrative.