The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea

From “one of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today [and] one of our best living authors” (The Washington Post) comes a deeply delightful seafaring adventure and a brilliant group portrait of female adolescence.

To escape the dangers of wartime bombings, the girls of St. Alwynn’s have been evacuated by their headmistress to a ship on the high seas. There, they live in a cloistered ecosystem of gossip and desire, hierarchies and rules. Yet instead of being safe, they find themselves plunged into a different kind of chaos. Trapped in a floating pressure cooker of teenage anguish and rivalry, their isolation is penetrated by just one thing: the weekly arrival of the mail bag, bearing letters from a distant boys’ ship. The letters, ritually decoded with the help of a makeshift Oracle, allow them to construct a parallel universe of meaning, revealing all the intricate and imaginative ways we buffer ourselves against the catastrophic realities of a world at war.

Through the eyes of the impulsive Dani, the high-minded Lorraine, the sensitive Flora, and the glamorous Yvonne, The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea creates a dramatically vivid mini-society. But as their ship sails onward, westward, or perhaps just around in circles, the girls find themselves in ever more peril. Will they never reach home? Is their headmistress okay? And what if they've completely misunderstood each other—and themselves?
Genuinely hilarious, and taking on some of the biggest questions of life, The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea delivers the absorbing, wondrous pleasures of childhood reading while inventing an entirely new category of narrative satisfaction, anchored by the psychological incisiveness Sheila Heti is known for. It is as though she has gone back in time and returned to the present with a lost modern classic in hand.