The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

Between every chapter the sun climbs and sinks over an empty shore and the waves come in, over and over, indifferent to the six lives unfolding in the spaces between. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis speak only in soliloquy, never once to each other, carrying their separate minds from the smell of a childhood garden to the weariness of old age. The book withholds almost everything a novel promises, no scenes, no dialogue, no narrator to tell you what to feel, and hands back something stranger and finer: the pure rhythm of being alive, six consciousnesses beating like one tide. When Percival, the seventh, the friend who never speaks, falls from his horse in India, his death reaches each of them as a separate wound, and you understand that love can go on existing as the shape of an absence. Rhoda, who says she has no face and no self to gather, carries the novel's terror; Bernard, at the last, flings himself at death unvanquished, pulling all six voices into one final charge against the dark.