The Seas is about a girl who believes she's a mermaid, wo lives in a town so far north the highway only goes south. She's in love with a returned soldier who won't touch her. She's afraid she might have to kill him. A book full of oceans and baths, drinking and drowning, water in all its forms - and a love story, unabashedly - The Seas is a gorgeous fever-dream of a novel which I read straight through over one sleepless night.
— Madeleine W
The Seas somehow deals with a plethora of heavy topics all in about 180 pages. The narrator is a young woman who lives in a seaside town so far north, the only way out is south. Though she wants to leave, she seems to be held captive, whether by her passion for an older man or her insistence that she is a mermaid and her dead father is calling her back to the ocean. Dealing with PTSD, death, sexual awakening, alcoholism and more, this book is a quick, but fascinating read.
— JoshNational Bestseller
"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 (from the Introduction)
A Most Anticipated Book of Summer at BuzzFeed, NYLON, and more.
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.