the last wave book review

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The Last Wave

Gillian Best House of Anansi Press ( Mar 6, 2018 ) Softcover $17.95 ( 304pp ) 978-1-4870-0293-0

In Gillian Best’s The Last Wave , raw human emotion teems just underneath the lapping surface of modern English life.

After accidentally falling into the sea while fishing with her father, Martha begins a lifelong romance with the salty waves. Despite her mother’s insistence that she take a traditional path, Martha dreams of swimming the English Channel. Even after marrying John, having children, and accepting domestic duties, she never loses that desire. The obsession sustains her through cancer, her husband’s Alzheimer’s, and a rift with her daughter, Harriet, formed because John will not accept Harriet’s relationship with another woman.

The novel is beautifully poignant. Its emotional undercurrents are presented in a quietly powerful style, free of manufactured melodrama. Details are carefully chosen and breathe life into depictions of Dover and France. Martha’s myrtle bush, a plant usually found near the sea, is a lovely recurring symbol of the connections, however loose, that hold her family together. It takes on human form in Harriet’s daughter, Myrtle, an eager young swimmer who establishes a link between Harriet’s wife, Iris, and Martha.

Though Martha is the binding centrality here, windows into her family’s perspectives are opened. This is particularly effective with John, who is at risk of being painted primarily as an antagonistic husband hell-bent on maintaining a traditional household. His sections of the novel brim with sympathetic sadness, especially once his Alzheimer’s surfaces.

For Harriet, navigating the waters of intolerance proves challenging. And while Alzheimer’s steals John’s chance to reach a point of acceptance, it softens the resentment Harriet has for him.

The Last Wave , like the sea that holds Martha in its grip, is both gently stirring and tumultuous, a harsh yet alluring voyage through the decades of a woman’s life.

Reviewed by Meagan Logsdon March/April 2018

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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The Last Wave by Gillian Best

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The Last Wave by Gillian Best

Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925773378

G ilian Best’s début novel, The Last Wave , is a thoughtful narrative that charts the intricacies of one family’s experiences and relationships across three generations, from the postwar period to the present. It makes use of the iconography of the coast and the unpredictability of the sea almost as a dramatis personae that motivates, consoles, and potentially threatens the characters in their proximate lives. Set on the coast of southern England, Best’s imagery is beautiful and evocative: windswept, shingle beaches, the White Cliffs of Dover, Vera Lynn’s haunting song.

Martha and John Roberts live by this grey and unruly sea; for Martha, a swimmer, it has always been an immersive experience of challenge, providing her with a sense of purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother. Her desire to swim the Channel, to feel salt on her skin, is life-defining, offering both independence and emotional connections.

The story is told in multiple voices within the family. This shifting of perspective does allow us to see into the various cross-currents of family life – its rifts as well its opportunities. However, it is also a rather wooden strategy, as it somewhat heavy-handedly stitches together its themes and symbolisms, providing no real rationale as to why we might be privy to each character’s point of view. In narrative terms, these varying currents are brought to a head in the novel’s present in which John descends into a fog of dementia, Martha is dying from cancer, and unspoken things surge and press.

Best nevertheless conveys a powerful sense of the emotional tides sweeping her characters. Her poignant portrayal of the enduring bonds between John and Martha, even in the face of such unravelment, gives insight into how we might all face that last wave when it inevitably comes.

Gillian Best
Text Publishing

Rose Lucas is a Naarm poet and academic at Victoria University. Her fifth collection, Remarkable as Breathing , was published by Liquid Amber Press (2024).

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How Gillian Best channeled her love of swimming into her debut novel

A beautifully rendered family drama set in Dover, England, between the 1940s and the present day, The Last Wave follows the life of Martha, a woman who has swum the English Channel 10 times, and the complex relationships she has with her husband, her children and her close friends. The one constant in Martha's life is the sea, from her first accidental baptism to her final crossing of the channel. The sea is an escape from her responsibilities as a wife and a mother; it consoles her when she is diagnosed with cancer; and it comforts her when her husband's mind begins to unravel.

6 books we can't wait to read in August

An intergenerational saga spanning six decades, The Last Wave is a wholly authentic portrait of a family buffeted by illness, intolerance, anger, failure and regret. Gillian Best is a mature, accomplished, and compelling new voice in fiction. ( From House of Anansi Press )