Years ago, the father of the nameless, nineteen-year-old narrator of The Seas walked out into the ocean and never came back. Before he disappeared, he told his daughter – then a small child – that she was a mermaid. In the years that followed, she turned this knowledge into a kind of quest. But while the girl’s belief that she is a mermaid is the basis for Samantha Hunt’s captivating first novel, what really matters is her all-consuming love for a man named Jude, which is doomed from the start.

The woman has been in love with Jude since she was twelve years old, and has poured all of her energy and dreams into her idea of who he is and what he means. A veteran of the Gulf War, Jude’s memories bring brief gusts of dry sand and dust to a story otherwise saturated with water. The war haunts him. He is an open wound, and at a decade older than her, tries hard to let their age difference stand as a reason not return her passion. Still, the two follow each other around their depressed ocean-side town, close friends despite the obvious tension. The woman, like so many heroines before her, is determined to save him.

Between stints as a chambermaid and in a sardine factory, she has plenty of time to muse about water, love and language. Hunt indulges her own clear fascination with the latter through the woman’s grandfather, a typesetter who spends his days picking through boxes of metal type as he compiles words for a dictionary. Though this sometimes feels too much like an indulgence, one of the book’s most memorable scenes occurs when the characters puzzle over a Russian word that means “the feelings one retains for someone he once loved”: “There’s a reason why we have no word for it. You don’t get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you’ve washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.”

Loving Jude is a job in itself. All her watching and waiting and wishing may look a lot like obsession, but the woman’s determination to keep him afloat, along with her thirst to pull him out to sea with her, feel wholly honest. She may be a mermaid, but she is also very human, driven by her body’s demands: “I’d like to push the hair from his face and trace the lines of his nose. I’d like to hold my finger below his nostrils for a long time until it is damp from his exhalations. Then I’d put the finger in my mouth and drink Jude’s breath.” Each detail and stray gesture is a new heartbreak as the story moves in waves toward its conclusion.

Through it all the specter of water looms large. The Seas feels like a sea shanty, a faded photograph. The setting is vivid but time feels slippery, fluid. The naked urgency of Hunt’s writing makes the book impossible to put down, its questions and finely drawn characters lodged in your head long after you’ve finished reading. This is a story about the senses, about being washed up and away while still bound to the heartbeat of a small town. The book is so absorbing that you may never notice the main character isn't given a name.