Our Wives Under The Sea

Name: Our Wives Under The Sea
Price: 5.99 GBP
Rating: 3.9 (63 reviews)
ISBN: 9781529017243

'A gothic fairy tale, sublime' – Florence Welch

Julia Armfield

- 3.9 • 63 Ratings

- £5.99

- £5.99

Winner of the Polari Prize 2023
Shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize

‘A gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness’ – Florence Welch

Our Wives Under The Sea is the haunting novel from Julia Armfiled, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep, deep sea.

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. But It soon becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had might be gone.

'A wonderful novel, deeply romantic and fabulously strange' – Sarah Waters, author of Ghost Wall

'Part bruisingly tender love story, part nerve-clanging submarine thriller' – The Times

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

If you enjoy relationship stories, thrillers, the supernatural and horror, you’ll find plenty to love in Julia Armfield’s extraordinary debut novel. But then it’s such a beautifully written and original piece of literary fiction that it’s hard to imagine many readers who wouldn’t be drawn into it from the first page. It’s the story of a married couple, Miri and Leah, whose relationship transforms when the latter, a marine biologist, suffers a terrifying experience—her submarine fails and sinks deep to the ocean floor. After Leah makes an improbable return to land months later, she is eerily different—distant and closed off, suffering strange, supernatural episodes. With impressionistic and atmospheric prose, Armfield toggles between depicting the couple’s life after the accident—Miri desperately striving to recover the wife she had before—and revealing haunting events of Leah’s existence underwater. This is a compelling study of grief, isolation and transformation that skilfully combines meditations on the mysteries of the sea with richly drawn portraits of a relationship blooming and then fading.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 9 MAY 2022

Armfield follows her collection, Salt Slow, with a moody and intimate debut novel, both a portrait of a marriage and a subtle horror fantasy. Miri and Leah are a married lesbian couple living in a British coastal city. Leah, a scientist with the Centre for Marine Enquiry, participates with her submarine crew in a deep-sea dive that is supposed to take three weeks but instead lasts six months, due to a malfunction, and Miri's reactions range from helpless panic to anger to acceptance and mourning as she phones desperately to get answers from the Centre. (She even joins an online community of role-playing women who imagine their husbands are astronauts in space.) When Leah returns, she begins exhibiting such symptoms as the "silvering" of her skin, sleepwalking, loss of appetite, and a need to be near or in water. She also spends hours in the bathroom with the taps running and a sound machine playing ocean surf sounds, and bleeds frequently: from her nose, gums, and through her skin. While Miri at first looks for a logical explanation for these maladies, their source remains mysterious. Meanwhile, the two have stopped communicating and sleep in separate bedrooms, and it begins to seem as if Leah is transforming into some nonhuman creature. With echoes of Jules Verne, Thor Heyerdahl (whose work inspired Leah), H.P. Lovecraft, and the film Altered States, Armfield anchors the shudder-producing tale in authentic marine science and a deep understanding of human nature. This is mesmerizing.

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