Our Wives Under the Sea

After a routine deep-ocean dive went catastrophically wrong, stranding her submarine on the floor of the abyss for months, Julia Armfield's debut opens with Leah slowly, uncannily changing in the couple's flat while her wife Miri watches, loves and grieves. Alternating between Miri's present-tense helplessness and Leah's spare log of the descent, Our Wives Under the Sea is less a monster story than a study of loss - what it is to keep loving someone as they become unreachable, to nurse a marriage as it dissolves like salt in water.

Armfield writes gorgeous, briny, precise prose and lets genuine body-horror bleed into a very human ache; the deep sea becomes a perfect metaphor for grief's pressure and dark. Short, strange and devastating, it is queer literary-speculative fiction of rare control.