The Seas - Hardcover

Hunt, Samantha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931561850 ISBN 13: 9781931561853

Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub, 2004

Synopsis

A young woman escapes her bleak life in a coastal town and her memories of her father's suicide eleven years earlier by falling in love with Jude, a sailor twice her age with a troubling secret, dreaming of becoming a scientist, and convincing herself that she is a mermaid. A first novel.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this retelling of "The Little Mermaid," Hunt traps readers in an undertow of tragedy gripping a bleak Northern fishing town. A young woman meets Jude, a sailor whose experiences in Iraq have rendered him watery and insubstantial. Jude becomes both love interest and paternal figure for the girl, whose own father disappeared at sea years before. Convinced she is a mermaid, she believes her love dooms the mortal Jude, but she longs to take him into the ocean with her. The sea's presence is constantly felt in the bleak, isolated town. "There is little else to do here besides get drunk and it seems to make what is small, us, part of something that is drowned and large, something like the bottom of the sea...." Atmospherically, the book resembles Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, but in this story, chances for redemption are rare, and the line between reality and fairy tale is blurred. The girl's grandfather, a typesetter, fills her head with words and definitions, but despite determining to observe everything as a scientific experiment, she cannot find a way to define the wet footprints she finds in odd places, the strange things she sees on the beach and her drowning love for Jude. While Hunt occasionally hammers her themes too hard—in one instance even listing them for us—this book devastates with its lonely, cold imagery.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1931561850
• ISBN 13: 9781931561853
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192