I am astounded that "Woman at Sea" is the debut novel. Catherine Poulain has written an immersive, captivating book that will stay with me for a long time after reading.

I suppose this was an okay book. I guess, mostly, I wasn't in the right mood for it, and that's on me. Unfortunately, I found the writing a bit too vague to the point of being pointless. I guess the crowning glory of this book is supposed to be its lack of context, but it got pretty annoying after a while. Maybe it's my fault for not embracing the new style, but I just didn't love it.

I was so unattached to the main character throughout the whole book and as a result, I could not care less. I was tempted to put it down many times. It's not that the writing itself is bad, in fact it was rich with immersive vocabulary, but the actual story just didn't give me enough to keep going on!

However, I will say that this book had a lot of potential and I think a lot of people will like it. Just not me.

Some evocative descriptions of life on an Alaskan fishing boat, and the oddball characters who end up here including the writer/ narrator, a French woman who wants to find herself (or is it to lose herself?) The story reads more like biography than a novel and, in spite of a fascinating premise, didn't draw me in or make me want to finish it.l

<i>That's all that matters, isn't it? Resisting, going the extra mile, outdoing yourself.'</I>

A strangely compulsive read, elemental and powerful, but also jagged in its writing (or is that the translation?) and opaque in places. Lili is a woman (how old? what's her background?) who decides for no good reason that she needs to leave her home to travel to the wilds of Alaska to join a fishing boat ('Have you fished before?', 'No,' I mumble. 'Do you have papers? Green card, fishing license?' 'No.') But we soon realise that this isn't a book interested in telling a linear story and we need to let go of those expectations to experience this at its best.

Because once we're at sea this is exhilarating in its wildness. Lili is no more a rounded character than any of the many sailors and fishermen who people these pages, she's a consciousness, fragmented and intermittent, only. Despite her frail, female body, and her inability to speak proper English, she survives, no, revels in the harsh, hyper-masculinised, exposed life on the boats - eating raw fish roe, poisoned by flying fish spines - and falling in love with 'the great sailor'.

More prose poem, in places, than novel, this is a book about excess in different forms - and startlingly immersive. And oh, what a gorgeous cover!