'The highway only goes south from here. That's how far north we live. There aren't many roads out of town, which explains why so few people ever leave.' The narrator of The Seas lives in a remote, alcoholic, cruel seaside town. Her grandfather is a typesetter and floods her mind with strange words and phrases. Awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love with a war veteran thirteen years her senior. He is returned from Iraq a distracted man, haunted by what he has witnessed on the seas. Her dead father has told her that she came 'from the water'. Convinced that she is a mermaid, she is troubled by what the old myths tell her about the doomed nature of love between mortals and mermaids. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend.