A haunting moment of sensibility which will subsequently act as a motif in the quest to know intimacy and achieve identity. All six characters in The Waves experience a similar crucible childhood moment. Authenticity, for her, was to be found in the secret and unspoken experiences of life, her “moments of being”. The native ground from where all her shoots would spring forth. She believed the experience remained at the very heart of her inner life, a kind of oracle. Virginia Woolf speaks somewhere of her earliest childhood memory – of being in bed as a very young child and listening to the sound of the waves distantly breaking on the beach out in the night. Epiphanies, private moments of triumph and failure - or what Virginia Woolf called 'moments of being'. A kind of archaeology excavating identity entirely from what’s buried and sacrosanct.

So The Waves is the biography of six characters, all of whom speak for the other five as much as for themselves. The six of you ultimately becoming one voice endeavouring to give shape to this one shared life. The narrative a fluid continuum where all six of you are continually merging and separating in a fellowship and divorce of feeling. Those secret and unspoken moments known only to ourselves when we feel at our most isolated or connected, our most transfigured, lost or unknowable. But through a linguistic transposition of the ebb and flow, the forging and eroding, of the waves of our inner life. Told not within the usual matrix of bald accountable facts, social landmarks of achievement and failure. Imagine this: a biography of you and your five best friends.

But once the code is cracked, the whole experiment has a brilliant simplicity. For the unprepared reader the first fifty pages can be as baffling as an unknown code.

The waves by virginia woolf