Our Wives Under the Sea
By Julia Armfield
- Genre
- Fantasy & Magical Realism
- Publisher
- Picador (Pan Macmillan)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781529017236
Miri's wife Leah returns from a deep-sea research mission profoundly changed after the submarine was trapped on the ocean floor far longer than planned. As Leah slowly transforms, the novel alternates between Miri's present grief and Leah's account of the descent. Julia Armfield's debut won the...
Leah has come home from the sea, but not entirely. 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. For readers who want the uncanny in service of real feeling, this Polari-winning debut is unforgettable.