Max Morden is an aging art historian whose wife has recently died of cancer. In his grief, he takes a trip to the seaside, to the rubble of the past, where he and his family spent holidays as a child. Here grief and memory coincide as he ponders not only his wifes death, but the drowning of two childhood friends, and, in the end, he finds that memory has the power to redeem him. THE SEA won the Mann Booker Prize in 2005.