The Waves

Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel is built from the soliloquies of six characters, Louis, Jinny, Bernard, Rhoda, Neville and Susan, whom it follows from childhood into adulthood. A seventh figure, Percival, is described again and again by the others but never speaks in his own voice. Between the monologues come nine short interludes in the third person that picture a seashore at different hours of one day, from sunrise to sunset. Through these voices Woolf examines individuality, the self and community, and blurs the line between prose and poetry; she called the work a playpoem rather than a novel. A 2015 BBC poll placed it 16th among the greatest British novels.

Dependabot co-founder Grey Baker praised its language as beautiful and unlike anything he had read before, and recalled being carried along by it for hours.