'Clear, bright, burnished ... the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry' The New York Times

Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation, and their questioning of the meaning of life itself. Perhaps more than any of Woolf's novels, The Waves conveys the endless complexities of human experience.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kate Flint

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist, essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Her family and friends were writers and artists and they later became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf suffered mental health problems throughout her life and, fearing another outbreak of mental illness, drowned herself in 1941.