July Underwater

As Lina steps into adulthood, she turns to the work of Virginia Woolf and Patricia Highsmith for insight into who she—and her friends—will become.

It's a typically sticky Toronto summer and Lina's spending her first couple of weeks after graduation reading and hanging out with her best friend Cara. Everything's calm—until she finds out that her childhood friend Alicia has died.

With her high school friends quickly drifting apart and her parents out of town, Lina tries to make sense of what has happened on her own. Hoping for answers, she turns to Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt. As Lina reunites with her friends for a final party on the shores of Lake Ontario, she finds herself wondering what it means to have known someone, and who they'll all become when they're no longer anchored to each other.

Winner of the Expozine Awards, July Underwater is an early work of Tiohti:ke (Montreal) based artist Zoe Maeve, now available to widespread audiences for the first time.

A beautifully illustrated, poetic, at times impressionistic yet straightforward tale that is strongly evocative of the kind of reminiscences and reflections experienced during summer beachfront escapes. - Juror comments, 2016 Expozine Awards