Private Rites
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- 149,00 kr
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'Brilliantly audacious' GUARDIAN
'Stunning' DAZED
'Her prose sparkles' ELIZA CLARK
‘Hauntingly good’ iNEWS
’A must read’ GLAMOUR
'One of my favourite novels' JEFF VANDERMEER
From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting, heart wrenching novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.
There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded
It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.
Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.
As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world.
A Book of the Year in the Guardian and Dazed
‘Armfield writes so gracefully’ THE TIMES
‘Evocative yet grounded’ OBSERVER
‘A chilling vision of a future capital that I’ve found impossible to shake’ INEWS
‘Ballard-ian in apocalyptic scope … Deeply, passionately, messily human’ PAUL TREMBLAY
‘A signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty’ ALICE SLATER
‘Every page guillotines you with its wisdom’ TOM BENN
Longlisted for the 2024 Climate Fiction Prize
About the author
Julia Armfield's work has been published in Granta, The White Review and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2023. She lives and works in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea) offers a grim and absorbing retelling of King Lear set in a damp near-future city resembling London. It's rained for so long that the infrastructure has collapsed and residents, who travel by water taxi, wonder if they're living in the end-times. Navigating this "endless ending" are three sisters—Isla, Irene, and Agnes—who are also coming to terms with the death of their famous father, a pompous architect of "mad glass boxes for rich people." Not only did the sisters hate him, they barely tolerate one another. Reunited on the eve of the funeral, they bicker ("I don't think... you can fix however many years of him playing us off against each other," Agnes says) before discovering a new dimension of their father's cruelty when his will is read. The character work is well done, with chapters revealing eldest daughter Isla's bossiness, Irene's struggle to stand out as the middle sister, and Agnes's irresponsibility. Though the apocalyptic denouement feels a bit contrived, Armfield succeeds at conjuring her characters' existential fears. This well-wrought family drama is tough to shake.
