I first read this book at the age of perhaps 16; I had heard it was the hardest of Woolf's novels and wilful as I was decided that this was the place to start on her oeuvre. In the intervening years for academic reasons and for pure unbridled envious pleasure I have read I believe everything that she wrote. These are among the precious books that another copy can never replace dog-eared bath-crinkled emphatically asterisked underlined full of marginalia (occasionally insightful often illegible). And of them all my copy of The Waves is the most scarred in this way; as a reader as a writer I constantly return for the lyricism of it the melancholy the humanity.-- Amy Sackville Independent