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.