The Waves

A title that 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.

Clear, 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

As a reader, as a writer, I constantly return, for the lyricism of it, the melancholy, the humanity

Virginia Woolf (Author)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse , Orlando , and The Waves .

Jeanette Winterson (Introducer)
Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? . Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.