From childhood to old age, six friends - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis - narrate their lives entirely in interior monologue, their voices rising and falling like the waves that punctuate the novel between chapters. Published in 1931, The Waves pushed the modernist novel further than Woolf, or almost anyone else, had dared: there is no conventional plot, no dialogue in the ordinary sense, only consciousness itself given rhythm and shape. Widely considered Woolf's most experimental and most purely poetic achievement, it remains a landmark of twentieth-century fiction.