The Seas

Samantha Hunt's amazing first novel, The Seas, has been out of print for several years; I am so happy that Tin House has republished it in this gorgeous new edition, so that a whole new group of readers can enjoy Hunt's graceful, brilliant prose. The Seas is a beautiful and feverish tale of grief, love, and magic narrated by a possible mermaid. Hunt's unique voice and vision are intoxicating. Recommended By Jill O., Powells.com

National 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.

“Creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature.” Michelle Tea

“Urgently real and magically unreal . . . A breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean’s merciless blue . . . [Hunt] sinks an anchor into the soul of its lost young protagonist.” The Village Voice

“One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I have read in years.” Dave Eggers

“It’s hard to imagine that a book so brief could tackle the Iraq war, grief over the loss of a parent, the longing for freedom, an enthrallment with the ocean, loneliness, sexual awakening, faith, and etymology, all in less than 200 pages, but Samantha Hunt has done it, and done it well.” Chicago Review of Books

Samantha Hunt's The Seas, her debut novel, won a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. She is also the author of Mr. Splitfoot, Dark, Dark: Stories, and The Invention of Everything Else. Hunt's writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Tin House, Cabinet, among others.