“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.
“[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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Reviews
[With] language at once poetic and precise...The result is a ravishing, utterly unique read.
Samantha Hunt is an exciting find - a fresh original voice ... a fantastical love story ... literary gold ... It should appeal to fans of The Time Traveller's Wife and Donna Tartt.
Intelligent, compassionate ... beautifully conjured.
An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes . . . Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction.
[An] entrancing first novel.
One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years. This book will linger . . . in your head for a good long time.
Clever and intense.
A gripping tale
A fantastical coming of age story.
Hunt presents a convincing portrayal of youthful confusion...Such gray, Chekhovian moments mark Hunt as a writer to watch.
Keeps the reader consistently surprised and enthralled
[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.
Urgently real and magically unreal...a breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean's merciless blue.
Characters are beautifully drawn and the world Hunt creates is quite haunting.