This is an intoxicating, atmospheric tale of a married couple Leah and Miri. Each telling their experience via alternating chapters.
Leah survives a deep diving mission that goes wrong. She quietly takes us through what went on, whilst Miri reflects on how they met, that they enjoyed simple time together watching films, reflecting also how they have grown apart. Whilst they clearly still care for each other Leah is changed by the mission.
There are wonderful descriptors about the ocean, how it is in some ways haunted, how it can act as a massive trap that were a joy to read. The situ on the deep diving vessel conveys a compelling sense of entrapment and altered psychological response. There is a hint of mermaid changeling effect that may or may not be quite so.
The loyalty and protectiveness of Miri is incredibly tender and accepting. I think I would have freaked out had this been me, seeking early medical attention, but clearly this would have ruined the magical essence that this story adeptly captured.
The ending was evocatively sad, perhaps a little underwhelming and predictable but poignant. Both characters, whilst slightly disconnected from people and life around them, were still seemingly kind and sincere and intriguing to learn about. I would have liked the backdrop about the other female character on the vessel and her sister’s insights on what happened to have been fleshed out a bit as this just felt incomplete. All in all though, a very immersive and intimate read that by its quirkiness is compelling. Impressive that this is debut novel also.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a beautiful, devastating and terrifying study of human connection and grief. When Leah returns from a disastrous submarine trip that trapped her at the bottom of the sea for months, Miri’s relief and trepidation are having her wife back is breathtakingly tangible. But something is very, very wrong with Leah and what unfolds is both a chilling horror story and Miri’s meditation on love, loss and what she stands to further lose. The characters are flawed and very real, their emotions tangible and the horror at the heart of this story is vivid without ever becoming overwrought or unlikely. I was gripped by Armfield’s beautifully descriptive writing and look forward to reading more from this talented new author.

Very very beautiful. A stunning story of trauma and its aftermath. I was a bit disappointed that we never found out the purpose of the 'research trip', but this was not essential to the plot.

I can't wait for everyone to read this beauty!

I remember reading it in a day. Greedily.
Incredibly atmospheric and eerie, the feelings of claustrophobia enhanced by real world anxiety.

We follow the disintegration of a relationship, and the author very cleverly draws comparisons between this and the physical changes wrought by a deep sea dive gone wrong. I watched Vigil around the time I read this, and the underwater sounds, and weight of the crushing ocean pressure added an additional sensory element to my reading.

The relationship flashbacks were intense, and left me heartbroken.

Highly recommend this beautiful heady portrayal of love, evolution and loss💔

Leah, a marine biologist, is finally back from a submarine expedition that went awry leaving the crew at the very bottom of the sea at unfathomable depth for months -- way longer than planned. Suddenly relieved, her wife Miri cannot but notice that Leah is strange and distant. And then strange things begin to happen.
Our Wives Under The Sea is the remarkable debut novel by author Julia Armfield, and is a mesmerizing, haunting, atmospheric and uncanny piece of new weird writing that calls to mind Jeff Vandermeer’s Trilogy and HP Lovecraft in several ways. It is told in mesmerizing the language and alternating voices that unveil what happened during Leah’s misadventure along with the two women’s backstory – their upbringing, religion, Leah’s fascination with the sea, their love story.
The trope of the character who comes back wrong is not new, yet Armfield’s writing goes further as it provides is a nuanced exploration of longing, guilt, haunting, being haunted and the uncanny (if you are familiar with the theories of the uncanny you’ll have a ball). The sea is the ideal locus for what is repressed, for Lovecraftian chthonic horror and the uncanny -- and here this takes different forms: the book touches on legend, religion and mysticism, the sense of awe that goes with it as well as the horror and abjection – and it cannot but end in indeterminacy, as there can be no way of fully grasping what is going on. A story of modern angst, beautiful and disorienting.

I am grateful to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Beautiful but terrifying! An amazingly haunting exploration of grief. Love a good gay story with a thrilling mystery.

Lyrical, mysterious and tender. 3.5 rating, raised

This was a somewhat curious read. It is a tender story of love, change and loss, between two women, but with somewhat unexplained strangeness. It is told from the perspective of both women. Miri recounts the present story. Leah, who may not quite be Leah any more in Miri’s ‘in the present’ account, tells the story of events which happened many months ago, at the time they are happening. Though its possible that Leah who may no longer quite be Leah is remembering all these events

Leah is a marine biologist. She takes part in a research project, with two others, descending to the sea floor, there to stay for some time. Something goes terribly wrong, and the deep sea observation submarine loses power, loses connection with its base on land.

And that land base is pretty odd too ‘The Centre’ – it’s never quite explained, but the ‘experiment’ which Leah and her fellows engage with may not be at all the observation of the creatures of the sea floor they think they are engaged in. There’s a possible whiff of the Portland Down, Governmental Secrecy about all of it.

Leah and her fellows are missing for many months, and The Centre is also mysteriously hard to contact

When Leah eventually returns, she is quite odd, and gets progressively stranger.

This trembles of the edges of being some kind of supernatural, conspiracy, horror, which is never fully spelt out.

This is both a strength and a weakness, as, in a sense, the same kind of slow seeping strangeness carries on

It is a short novel, but, even so, I felt the dynamic dragged a little, and this could have been still shorter.

The challenge was that I found my attention beginning to wane, realising that most likely, ‘explanation’ would not be forthcoming, so what was left – the trajectory of the story and its apt ending being obvious, was atmosphere.

Our Wives Under the Sea
‘I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through a different set of eyes.’
A queer love story, a modern gothic horror, a fairy tale; however we want to label it – Julia Armfield’s debut novel is an exquisitely penned tale of falling in love, of loss and grief. Her unerring prose will submerge you in her world; from the bottom of the inky, dark ocean bed, to the mind of a woman whose world has been dismantled to the point of obscurity.
Miri & Leah, happily married, a couple who are used to periods of separation because of Leah’s job as a deep-sea research scientist. Happy, until Leah goes missing during one of her missions and is away for 6 months. When she returns, she is changed and their relationship changes with it.
Told in alternating voices; what I think are diary entries from Leah, during her time at the bottom of the ocean and then Miri, a more intimate account of events, her relationship with her wife, her dead mother and the friends around them.
The diary entries are sparse and foreboding; they are laden with the claustrophobic weight of the water, the darkness that surrounds the broken vessel that Leah finds herself in is ominous and terrifying. Over the days and months, stranded, helpless and without knowledge of anything beyond that metal container, Armfield manages to portray the resultant madness, the disintegration of self with haunting clarity.
‘In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve’
What plays out in Miri’s pages is more poignant, a closely observed account of love and loss, what we cling to when something slips through our fingers, when someone close dies or just disappears, how we cope when we need to move forward, even by the tiniest of degrees.
This book’s climax is beautiful in its tenderness, heartfelt as it is tragic, a physical manifestation of the core of this allegorical tale. Pure brilliance, I adored it!

3.5***

Not too sure I understood that and what was going on. I still want some answers.

This book was lyrical and haunting. It explored relationships, grief and the sea. Despite finding this absolutely bizarre and not achieving answers I still want, the writing spurred me on.

I think this is less of an answer book and more of an exploration of emotion and letting go. We follow Miri and Leah and their relationship before and after Leah emerges from an underwater job. Miri who is left behind while Leah went on an underwater mission. We see Miri recount the start of their relationship, before Leah submerges, the months Leah was “missing” and her reappearance. We also witness Miri trying to deal with the weird and radical changes to Leah- Leah is changed after coming up from the water and Miri is at her wits end trying to figure out what happened to “her Leah”.

While I wanted answers definitely (what is this centre!? What did Leah write/observe? What did Leah become? What is Miri’s future?) this was definitely more a story of grief over someone “lost” to us, the breakdown of a relationship and ultimately letting go of the person you loved.

While the writing was lyrical and I enjoyed witnessing the relationship of Miri and Leah, the bit that really drew my attention was Leah under the sea and the descriptions of this- absolutely stunning.

This was a very odd and weird book, and while I prefer books with set answers, this was very impactful and has left me contemplating about the book after.

Thank you NetGalley for this Arc.

With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

This is an intriguing, surreal novel. Miri's marine biologist wife Leah returns long after all hope was lost for the deep-sea submarine mission she was on. Miri has already started to go through the grief process for her lost wife, compounded by the dangling uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to the submarine she was on. When Leah returns it is soon obvious she has changed - reluctant to speak or go out, with changes to her skin, unexplained nosebleeds, and a propensity to spend ever longer hours in the bath which she leaves ringed with slime when she emerges.

As she adapts to life with this changed Leah, Miri's universe becomes ever more narrow and detached from outside realities. She interacts with the outside world, but her narrative is almost completely an internal one as the reality at home becomes stranger and stranger, and she feels unable to share what is happening with her friends. Chapters alternate between Miri and Leah's narrative voices, but Leah's account only deals with the preparations for her mission and the experience on the submarine when power fails. We get nothing about the circumstances of her return, or the causes of the changes in her that go far beyond those expected after a return to the surface from the deep.

I wasn't expecting a horror story, but it slowly dawned on me as I read that this is precisely what we have here. The best kind of horror, not one of nightmare-inducing shocks but rather presenting a build-up of small differences which subtly displace our sense of the world until it becomes unthinkable, and where no attempt at an explanation is provided. This is a small, perfectly formed gem of a novel.

This book honestly made my head spin, it was so good. A split narrative between Miri, sharing what happens after Leah returns home from a submarine voyage that goes terribly wrong, and Leah, her wife, narrating what happens when she and 2 crewmates are stranded in the deepest part of the ocean for three months.

There is a claustrophobic element to both parts of the story, from Leah being physically trapped on tiny vessel, with the immense pressure of the ocean all around her, to Miri trapped by her own need to stay close to her ailing wife, and equally trapped in her feelings of loss, grief, and confusion.

This isn't a book that provides huge amounts of answers. Like the ocean itself unsettling, changeable, overwhelming, and there are always more mysteries than answers - and none of that makes it any less beautiful or awe-inspiring.

There are multiple ways you could interpret the cause of Leah's condition, the cause of the submarine accident, and the structural elements of the plot, and yet as much as it might have been satisfying to have those answers from the author, being left without those answers draws us closer to Miri, especially, as she seeks answers and wonders what the hell happened, if the woman who came back from the deep is even really her wife or something very different.

Wow, this was trippy! I'm still slightly discombobulated since surfacing from the novel and I'm not entirely sure whether that's a good thing.

I adored the premise; I love sapphic novels, I'm fascinated by the deep sea and this sounded like nothing I had ever read before. Armfield writes like a dream, escpecially her descriptions. The claustrophobia and confusion was completely palpable and I felt myself go slightly mad alongside the characters.

For me, Miri's narrative just wasn't nearly as interesting as Leah's. I found myself sighing in relief when they ended and the 'real story' could start up again. I wish the novel had been slightly more clear-cut in terms of the tone it was hoping to evoke - I took everything very literally initially (I wondered whether Leah's physiological symptoms are true to life complications of exposure to such high pressure) but then the story became more psychological and - perhaps even - teetered on horror. I just wish Armfield had committed either way!

Nevertheless, a really interesting book - just not sure it's one I'd revisit in a hurry.

The characters in this book were beautifully set up and the pacing was on point alongside this. The writing was immersive and I found myself getting lost in this horror fairytale.

This was just as eery and creepy as I hoped. Very well written, I fles through this one, kept me on the edge of my seat. If you love weird, creepy, atmospheric stories this one is for you.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I've never read anything quite like this book. At less than 200 pages, it's a slim volume but Armfield makes every word count. I just want to go back to the beginning and start again to pick up on every little detail and turn of phrase. It's an absolutely stunning, genre-bending piece of writing and should be nominated for every award going this year.

This is the only story I have read from Armfield, but she is now an auto-buy author for me! I couldn't put this book down. I have annotated and tabbed the heck out of it. Every page was so beautiful and eerie. Also, Florence Welch loved this book and that is honestly the biggest flex for a debut novel.

This is a dual perspective between married couple Miri and Leah. Leah just came back from a submarine quest gone wrong and is just a shell of who she was before the trip. Miri is elated to have Leah back but slowly starts to mourn the relationship they once had.

We get flashbacks to their relationship "before" as well as Leah's expedition under the sea. Both were so heart-wrenching and I could feel Miri's pain and Leah's terror.

Miri is witnessing a physical change in Leah and will soon have to confront it. (cw: body horror)

The writing is melancholic and the sections are short, making this easy for a lump to form in your throat and easier to fly through the pages. This is honestly a perfect novel to go into blind, so just pick it up! You won't regret it.

I was drawn into the cover of this book and I had little idea of what lay on its pages. It ended up being very unique and strange, so I’m glad that I had no expectations going into it.

Miri’s wife Leah has finally arrived home after a deep sea mission that went wrong. However, Leah appears to have brought back part of the sea with her and she isn’t the same woman who boarded that submarine. Miri can feel her wife slipping away from her and she must come to some kind of acceptance that their life will never be the same.

Of course, there is plenty of commentary on female relationships and in particularly, lesbian relationships. It’s delivered with humour, honesty and thoughtful observations, which made me fully believe in Miri and Leah’s marriage and them as real people.

Armfield is a wonderful writer and there were several points in the book that caused me to reflect on my own view of the world. The entire book is a metaphor for relationship breakdown and mental illness and it’s done is such a clever, powerful manner. I’d never confronted these topics through this medium before and I really appreciated the fresh take on themes that have been done a million times over.

Leah’s chapters reiterated how terrifying the ocean is. I’ve always been simultaneously in awe and a little afraid of the sea and Leah’s reminder that there are so many mysteries in its deepest, darkest depths is so scary to me. These secrets pose a chilling threat that seeps through the book’s pages and drives it towards its strange, ethereal end.

Our Wives Under The Sea is a unique, refreshing look at literary themes that we’ve all definitely read about before but perhaps not quite like this. It’s immersive, imaginative and delivers a heartbreaking ending that is still somehow tinged with hope. A feminist allegory that sings mournfully about true love and the pain of letting it go.

In a way, this book is a ghost story. It's the haunting of things left behind, lives lived, words unspoken and it plays brilliantly into the very human fear that you can't ever know someone and what goes on inside their head, not truly—even the people you love the most.

It follows two PoVs: a biologist Leah who embarks on a submarine research trip that's only meant to be 3 weeks and ends up being trapped down there for 6 months, and her wife Miri who's back at home going out of her mind trying to sort through the wreckage that is her life now, especially once Leah returns and she comes to the realisation that shes came back 'wrong'.

It's a hard book to categorise. It has the creeping dread and fear of the unknown of cosmic horror, the pure wrongness & absurdity of weird fiction, yet the intimate (at times almost voyeuristic) look at characters that comes with literary fiction these days.
It reminded me of reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor last year. Two very different books but both have the same 'surrounded by people yet achingly lonely' vibe to me.

It might be a boring read to some, if you need a book with a lot of plot then it's maybe not for you but you guys know I love character writing and wow did it meet my expectations!
We've got lesbians written for lesbians by a lesbian and boy does that come across—and I mean that as a huge compliment from a queer woman myself!

Miri especially is so human. I like reading about women who aren't perfect and don't fit into neat little boxes. Miri is selfish and grief makes her even more so but I like how Armfield writes it in a way that says maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing. Grief after all is an inherently selfish thing.

It may only be March but it's already in the running for 2022 favourite.
Thanks to @netgalley & @picadorbooks for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
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This is an intriguing, surreal novel. Miri's marine biologist wife Leah returns long after all hope was lost for the deep-sea submarine mission she was on. Miri has already started to go through the grief process for her lost wife, compounded by the dangling uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to the submarine she was on. When Leah returns it is soon obvious she has changed - reluctant to speak or go out, with changes to her skin, unexplained nosebleeds, and a propensity to spend ever longer hours in the bath which she leaves ringed with slime when she emerges.

As she adapts to life with this changed Leah, Miri's universe becomes ever more narrow and detached from outside realities. She interacts with the outside world, but her narrative is almost completely an internal one as the reality at home becomes stranger and stranger, and she feels unable to share what is happening with her friends. Chapters alternate between Miri and Leah's narrative voices, but Leah's account only deals with the preparations for her mission and the experience on the submarine when power fails. We get nothing about the circumstances of her return, or the causes of the changes in her that go far beyond those expected after a return to the surface from the deep.

I wasn't expecting a horror story, but it slowly dawned on me as I read that this is precisely what we have here. The best kind of horror, not one of nightmare-inducing shocks but rather presenting a build-up of small differences which subtly displace our sense of the world until it becomes unthinkable, and where no attempt at an explanation is provided. This is a small, perfectly formed gem of a novel.

Words can’t really express how much I loved this book, and by now many others will have done much better to describe the wet weirdness of it, so I’ll keep my effusive praise concise. Armfield’s first novel, following her equally impressive short story collection Salt Slow, alternates between the first person narratives of Leah - writing what she knows of what happened to her on an extended submarine trip - and Miri - coming to terms with how different her wife is on her return from the sea. Our Wives Under the Sea is poetic, beautiful, and terrifying. It’s a gush of cold water to bring you out of a horrible dream and into an even more horrible reality.