Wow. Just wow. I honestly had no idea what to expect from this book. It was one I selected purely on title and cover (which is AMAZING). It’s actually quite tricky to describe what I got. There is an undercurrent of unease throughout this whole book, which builds to an inevitable event that left me feeling bereft. The characters are so beautifully drawn, the premise so scarily plausible and the whole book so beautifully written, that what I CAN say is that I don’t really know what that was, but I ADORED it.

A literary horror! Not something I'd normally naturally pick up but I had seen so much hype around this book that I felt like I needed to see what all the fuss was about. I am so glad I did, and all the fuss is totally justified. A story all about love and grief and everything in-between. Leah returns from a deep sea mission to her wife Miri. She should have been under the sea for 3 weeks and returns after 6 months. To begin with everything seems okay, but it becomes quickly apparent that Leah is not the same person she was when she left and that the sea voyage she embarked on was much darker than initially thought, Beautifully written and full of tension.

‘’The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Unstill, is the word Leah uses, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound though the evening is quiet - dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.’’

Leah has been fascinated by the sea for her entire life. She’s attracted by its unknown depths – what really does lie beneath?
She is married to Miri and her marine research takes her away on field trips for weeks at a time. But the latest one has lasted for over 6 months and Miri cannot get anyone at the Centre to tell her what is happening to Leah and her two colleagues. They maintain an unhelpful silence.
Meanwhile Leah is in a submarine lying far, far below the ocean’s surface. She has never been down so far before and they are surrounded by darkness. None of their equipment is working and they have no contact with the outside world. But was it a genuine accident that they fell so far or was it deliberate?
And then Leah returns. But changed. What happened to her in the watery depths and why has the Centre quietly stopped operating? And as her metamorphosis begins, Miri realises that their marriage and life together may be coming to an end. She may have to make the ultimate sacrifice for the woman she loves…
This is a real slow burner of a book which has been marketed as literary horror. It’s told in the third person and alternates through Leah and Miri’s eyes. The reader learns how they met, married and their lives together. And slowly we also learn of Leah’s fate, trapped in a claustrophobic vessel as they wait and hope for rescue. On dry land she and Miri live in an almost equally claustrophobic situation in a tiny flat hemmed in by their upstairs neighbours constant TV. With Leah, the reader shares her terror at the submarine falling so far below. The crew hear a voice and strange noises which one of her colleagues’ claims is a ghost
But their relationship changes when Leah comes home. From a marriage in which they were equals, it shifts to Miri slowly and insidiously becoming Leah’s carer. As she bleeds, spends most of her time in the bath and starts to become unrecognisable, Miri begins to realise that she may have to let go of their time together as a final act of love. The horror at home is counterbalanced by Miri still going about her everyday life; working and seeing friends while not understanding what is happening to her wife.

The horror element is kept low-key and it’s left to the reader’s imagination to picture Leah’s transformation. A revival of the body horror genre perhaps? It’s also a very tender story as Miri begins to accept what is happening and her grief at knowing that they will lose their lives together.
The book is Julia Armfield’s debut novel and she has spoken about her love of horror movies and how they have influenced her particular form of queer gothic. Water metaphors abound as does the claustrophobia. Some commentators have commented on the very overt water metaphors and symbolism, but I felt that it suited the plot. It was such an atmospheric story as well in the combination of their daily lives and the strong sense of the unseen. The reader learns what happens to Leah and the crew, but Miri never does. However, she has to deal with its aftermath.

I loved this book for its strangeness and its atmosphere – it’s a novella and the length felt about right. A wonderful cover as well.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC.

Gosh this is a strange book…and almost impossible to capture the descriptive nature of the whole thing in a review. If you like stories with an element of the fairy tale, a bit of horror, a desolation, and yet a compelling love, you will enjoy this.

It is the story of Leah who goes on a deep sea diving expedition and something goes wrong. Eventually she returns to her wife and her life but… the Leah who has returned isn’t the Leah that Miri married and she has no clue how to help her or what to do about her need to soak in the bath for hours and hours and hours and not eat anything.

The book is written in a slow, mellow way with the unfurling seeming almost normal and expected after such a trip but of course it is anything but…

If you want something a little odd and a lot eerie, this is for you. I will reread it again in a while to appreciate the writing now I’ve gotten the whole story. I like the fact that a lesbian couple are in a book that isn’t just a formulaic romance - this book is certainly not formulaic. What an imagination Ms Armfield has - and I will be going back to read her short story collection.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley.

3.5/5
Sadly this ended up being a case of "It's not you, it's me." (probably due to my ridiculously high expectations & wishing the book to fill in the particular brackets I hoped that it would)
I was hoping more for a story of big fish (a la Mira Grant's INTO THE DROWNING DEEP), but what this is is a story about big feelings. Thematically, this book did explore a lot of things I hoped it would, and I think the way it dove into both the internal turmoil of Leah's time underwater and the complicated new dynamics of her return as someone (or something) else fraying their marriage were fantastic. I also feel the need to point out that the writing style itself is simply gorgeous and I found myself highlighting section after section. If you're looking for an introspective, quiet kind of tension, you will really appreciate this and I highly recommend picking it up.
I, however, really mostly wanted water cryptids and more in your face horror with perhaps less build up, so the book fell short in comparison to those expectations. Regardless, this was a solid read!

I think this might be one of those books that divide people. Personally, I got to 50% before wondering if I just wasn’t ‘getting’ it. Sometimes when I feel that way I have a sneaky peek at other reviews to see if other people are feeling the way I am but faced with a swathe of 5-star reviews I decided to persevere and I am very glad I did.

The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of Leah and Miri, a married couple. Leah is a marine researcher who goes on frequent deep sea trips whilst Miri waits for her at home. On one such trip, something goes badly wrong with Leah’s mission and when she finally returns, she is no longer the woman she once was. She begins exhibiting strange behaviour like taking baths for hours and drinking saltwater. Her skin and eyes begin changing as Leah herself starts to transform into someone or something else.

There is a significant horror/supernatural element to this book but it is literary horror as opposed to Stephen King type horror. The writing is subtle, lyrical and claustrophobic and as a reader, we never really get to grips with exactly what has happened to Leah and what went wrong on her mission. I’m not sure the characters do either, including Leah herself. The process of Leah’s slow transmutation and Miri’s dedication to her despite everything was strangely beautiful and touching. There’s a real sense of sadness and melancholy running through both points of view, with both characters looking back on their relationship and how they came to be where they are now. I felt Leah’s point of view was the stronger of the two and I enjoyed reading her chapters more.

Despite the supernatural and body horror element, I felt that this was a book about grief and letting go, whether that’s at the end of a relationship or at the end of life. It’s a strange book and won’t be for everyone but there is something really rather special here and it stuck with me long after reading it.

'Beyond this point, there is a final layer… This layer is known as the Hadalpelagic, or Hadal One, a name which speaks for itself. Lying between roughly nineteen and thirty-six thousand feet, much of this layer of the water is unexplored, which is not to say uninhabited.'

Miri’s biologist wife Leah has returned home after a deep-sea mission that was supposed to last for three weeks, but took three months. Leah won’t or can’t explain the length of her absence, and when Miri repeatedly calls her employer, the Centre, she remains in an endless loop of recorded messages. Leah’s account of the mission alternates with Miri’s longer sections, as she describes how their submarine began to sink, as planned – and then just kept sinking. With the lights and power off, and the comms broken, they had no way of knowing just how deep they’d fallen – and no way of getting back up.

When I first read about Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield’s first novel, it sounded like it ticked a lot of my boxes. Deep-sea exploration, lesbians, speculative fiction, horror… plus that haunting cover. However, I couldn’t have anticipated just how much I would love this book. I am officially obsessed. Much as I love this kind of crossover between literary fiction and speculative fiction/horror, I don’t think we should underestimate just how difficult it is to pull off. While I think these two kinds of writing can work so well together (my own novel-in-progress, The Forest That Eats Bone, also occupies this space), some of their demands pull against each other. The kind of concrete explanations for mysterious phenomena that you might get in science fiction, for example, don’t always work well alongside the usual rhythms of literary prose; meanwhile, literary fiction’s penchant for strange metaphor can be confusing in a story where bizarre things are actually happening. Armfield balances this perfectly. We learn just enough about the Centre to root Leah’s mission in the real world, while also positioning it in the realms of the uncanny (in comparison, Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed Annihilation drifted too far into unreality for me). Her use of unsettling scientific facts about the deep sea allows what is possible and what is impossible to bleed beautifully into each other.

However, the other thing that anchors this story is the relationship between Miri and Leah. Armfield avoids the temptation of romantic vagueness that seems to catch so many writers of speculative literary fiction and makes them both wonderfully-observed, concretely realistic people. I loved Miri’s stray observations about the Leah she knew before her wife embarked on the mission: ‘The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year would say something so blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as if warding off evil’. Their world, too, is rendered in such fine detail, from the sound of the neighbour’s television that constantly blares into their flat to the way the weather was on their first date: ‘The night was wet, air close and flannel-damp’.

Our Wives Under The Sea is not one of those frustrating literary novels that is simply a metaphor for something else, but it uses the potential of its plot to talk about grief in expertly moving ways. Armfield has written about her interest in ‘women and their bodies’ and this certainly comes through in Our Wives Under The Sea; alongside the weird metamorphosis of Leah’s body after she emerges from the ocean, Miri recollects caring for her mother in the final stages of dementia, and the way she lost control of her own movements after a life of adopting only very rigid facial expressions. The ending of the novel – and this never happens – made me cry.

Armfield’s prose is absolutely stunning, but this is not a novel that is all about the writing. (I wouldn’t love it so much if it was). It’s a gorgeous, heartbreaking book about the relationship between two women and what becomes of that relationship, and it gets a full five stars from me, which is another thing that almost never happens. But I guess stranger things have happened at sea.

This is an absolutely beautiful, emotional read. A touching love story with an undertone of something.....other. Gorgeous writing and a story that feels incredibly deep for such a short novel/ I loved it.

I loved the sound of this book, and I admire any writer who thinks outside of the box, and this one certainly did .However, I found the pace of the book to be too slow for me .I am an impatient reader, but try as I might I didn't connect with the book. I am really sorry to say it just wasn't for me, but I am glad to be in the minority, and glad that other readers enjoyed it more.

We begin with Miri, who describes what it is like since her wife returned from a lost research dive in a submarine. We follow her experience as her wife, Leah, spends more and more time in the bath.

Whatever way you think the story might go from this brief initial introduction, it is unlikely that it will quite follow your imagined trajectory and this, combined with the wonderfully eerie descriptions of the world beneath the waves, makes <em>Our Wives Under the Sea</em> a very pleasing and absorbing read. The sea and its depths haunt Leah and the reader. What is really down there? Why has the research company she was working for gone to ground? What were they really looking for down there, and how ethical was their dive?

I should have published this review weeks ago when the novel was fresh, but it's testament to the writing that I can still vividly see the last few scenes from both Miri and Leah's perspectives. Like a mermaid's wish in reverse, this novel questions how life crawled from the ocean and what it might be like to go back. It insistently presses the unknown down like the fathomless weight of the ocean squeezing the breath from your thoughts, the blood from your flesh. It's a great read. It comes out on the 3rd of March 2022, so pre-order it now.

Our Wives Under The Sea is Julia Armfield's stunning debut. Miri thinks she has her wife back, when Leah finally returns after 6 months, after a 3 week deep sea mission ended in catastrophe. 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. To have the woman she loves back should mean a return to normal life, but Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had might be gone.

This has to be one of the most stunning novels that I've read in a long time - Armfield's writing is hauntingly lyrical and beautiful. The observations of relationships, where she introduced small ideas that felt so unique and specific, are so lovely and real. Yet there's mystique in the horror all the way through the novel, it's slow and quiet and creeping as the oddness of the circumstances grow.

Otherworldly, strange, mesmerizing, tender, frightening, beautiful. This is going to be one of The Books of 2022.

Rightfully hyped and raved about, a stunning literary and lyrical novel. I purchased it after reading this ebook.

..𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘯𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘦𝘵, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘺𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦, 𝘴𝘦𝘮𝘪-𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘥 𝘨𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘴, 𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘺𝘰𝘭𝘬 𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘱𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘭..

A hauntingly gothic style book which fully absorbed me. Julia Armfield's novel Our Wives Under The Sea is the much anticipated read of 2022. It follows the story of Miri, whose world falls apart when her wife Leah goes on a deep sea mission and although promisingly, Leah does return (after a lengthy spell) , an unexpected turn of events and she is not who she seems to be. In fact, she is water...

A strangely mysterious, eerie and chilling fairytale full of atmospheric features, it'll leave you wondering what is beneath the waters and questioning the impact of the deep sea. Armfield effectively delivers the chapters ranging between perspectives of Leah and Miri to present the deep love and loss encountered by the women. Whilst Miri's perspectives are present moments which drives the narrative forward, Leah's estranged perspective displays the fragmented view of the world she now lives in and the shattering effect of what occurred at the dive. As Leah slowly transforms into water or a possibly other wordly creature; it becomes apparent both women are struggling with the unpredictable current of life. Drawing in a myriad of folklore and mythology, our Wives Under The Sea is a captivating story which will definitely be a top contender for a 5* read this year. Thank you @netgalley for my arc. Loved it!

💯 recommend

When I saw an upcoming first novel by Julia Armfield, I just had to get my hands on it. I was judge on the Shadow Panel for the 2019 The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award when her short story collection salt slow was shortlisted for the main award and won the Shadow Panel.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a story of two women, Miri and her wife Leah. Miri works from home writing grant applications for charities; Leah is an explorer, a scientist working on deep sea research for the mysterious Centre (there's something a bit... off... about the Centre, although we never find out what). In chapters narrated alternately by Miri and Leah, Armfield tells how Leah went to sea, was lost, and unexpectedly returned. And about the aftermath of that. Along the way we hear about their earlier lives, how they met, and their friends.

It's a short book but packs so much in. There is loss, twice over - Miri's time after Leah vanished (her dive went several months past its scheduled end) is mentioned in retrospect, with her complex feelings, the lack of closure, hinted at. More directly addressed is the growing realisation that the person who came back is not the same. Returned, Leah spends much of her time in the bath; she eats little; there is little conversation and no intimacy. Yet is she is, indisputably, back and shows flashes of her old self - and Miri desperately tries to find a way to cope, to reach out, researching, for example, an online community 'Our Husbands in Space' of women who pretend that their husbands have gone off on space missions (or, in some cases, 'Come Back Wrong" - CBW).

The Centre is little help, refusing to take Miri's calls, eventually providing a counsellor who it fails to pay. It's as though Leah has gone again, and only Miri's love for her remains. Miri's emotions - a mixture of anger, fear and (declining) hope really come over, all complicated by her relationships with her (now dead) mother and fear of developing the same degenerative illness as her (Miri once booked a generic test but lost track of time and missed the appointment). Miri has always seen herself as the one in the relationship who might end up needing care - selfishly, she now understands - and struggles to understand how she should be with Leah, becoming isolated from her friends and letting work slide.

Leah's side of things focusses more on the research voyage and her relationship in the diving ship with her two crewmates. Leah was always ocean obsessed - as a teenager her best friend was an octopus - so you'd think the dive would have been everything she wanted but the account of it seems frustrated, slightly disengaged, as though something were wrong from the start. Nor does it reveal, exactly, what it was that changed her so much (Armfield is clear that Leah is changed, and changing). The meaning of what happened needs to be read between the lines, worked out, imagined. There is a lurking sense of strangeness here, of being excluded from something even as we're let in to be told about events on the ocean floor (Leah hasn't shared these yet with Miri, though she will - but we don't see what Miri will make of them, another of the frustrations to communication which litter the book)

Alongside all the weirdness (lovely weirdness!) Armfield gives us very mundane, rooted scenes of modern life: a party with Leah's mates, figures who are immediately familiar, the recurring annoyance of a neighbour who leaves their TV on loud at all hours, the difficulty of negotiating the logic loop of a call centre. Gradually, I began to compare the isolated lives of Leah, Jelka and Matteo in their little capsule on the seabed with those of Leah and Miri marooned in their flat. Their lives outside those settings seem to become, increasingly, stories they recall or tell themselves, Leah almost unable to leave the flat, Miri more and more unwilling to do so. Isolation brings recollections of earlier lives - Miri's mother, Leah's dad from whom she seems to have taken her obsession with the oceans.

Inevitably the question arises of whether this is a "lockdown" novel and, yes, it does have that sense of enclosure, of squashing one's head against the window, as well as reflecting on the openness of sea (the book is imbued with the heaviness of the ocean) and sky ('People grow odd when there's too much sky'). But there's much more going on here than that. Leah's and Miri's lives, as seen in glimpses of the 'before' are being milled into something else by the rolling of the waves and that's not just a slide, it's a very active process which we seen going on - and, while the book may sound very sorrowful, it's not a process without hope.

I'd strongly recommend Our Wives Under the Sea .

When Miri's marine biologist wife Leah returns to her after an absence of six months spent lost in the depths of the ocean, something has intrinsically changed about her. It's not just physical symptoms, that could be attributed to scurvy or the bends - Leah's mind is changing as surely as her body. As Leah floats farther and farther away from her, Miri ponders on the love they shared and the life they'd built. Can she bring Leah back to her, or has she lost her to the ocean for good?
This was a very haunting read, hard to define - is Leah's metamorphosis an allegory for Miri's grief at losing her wife to the sea? Could Leah's return and changing nature all be in her mind. But Leah''s additional narrative and the hint of menace about the Centre for Marine Enquiry which employed Leah suggests not.
What is certain is the power of Miri's love for Leah and her willingness to let her go on what might be her final journey.
Themes of loneliness, grief and aloneness pervade this story, but it's over-riding message is one of the sacrificial beauty of love.

trigger warning
<spoiler> trauma, memory loss, body horror </spoiler>

After her wife returns, she is different. At first, only in mind, but then her body begins to change, too.

Hauntingly beautiful.
We have two POVs, the wife who went under the sea and the one who remained, who waited, many months when the trip was supposed to only take one day.

Nothing is really explained and the ending is kind of open. If that sort of story frustrates you, this book is not for you.

I can't really say too much because it's mostly about the atmosphere without much plot.
I liked it a lot and will probably read more by the author.

The arc was provided by the publisher.

Oh how I loved the mysteriousness lurking between the lines of this novel. There's a strangeness loitering in the background of what could otherwise be consider normality. A fantastical quality that is barely mentioned yet feels very real, even oppressing at times. I also loved the playfulness of the prose, the water vocabulary is so cleverly used all throughout the novel to the point of no escape other than going back into the water.

In many ways this reminded me of Shirley Jackson's style, but very much original in its own way. I'd say Julia Armfield is a very interesting and promising author.

A haunting read. i read and loved salt slow by julia armfield last year and i was very excited to read her first full length novel. following two women and their marriage after one of them returns from a submarine trip that went wrong, it's a slow unwinding of how they both cope with the event, how their lives do and don't work now, and what horrors might be lurking under the surface

A truly haunting, immersive story with some of the most incredible, lyrical writing I've ever read. As perfect as a book can be.

Our Wives Under the Sea is an utterly immersive, deeply moving story about love and grief, and the mysteries of the sea. Leah, a research marine scientist, has returned from a trip to the bottom of the ocean. Miri, her wife, is at first relieved to have her beloved back home safe. But Leah is not the same woman, and as the story progresses, the author expertly drip feeding clues, it becomes apparent that the sea voyage may have been something much darker. I couldn't put this book down, the characters of Miri and Leah and their alternating perspectives hooked me, and I was caught. Haunting, lyrical, powerful, I can't wait to read whatever Armfield writes next.