Julia Armfield turns her hand to the climate crisis in this stark, unsettling take on King Lear. Rich with the kind of evocative detail and sharp observation that Armfield excels at, Private Rites is a powerful novel about sibling rivalry, loss, and humdrum daily life at the end of the world.

I loved this! Julia Armfield is a truly great writer. The way she explores identity and relationships is phenomenal - but better than that this book explored the end of the world. A dark concept, and yet Julia wrote about it with wit and finesse, creating something emotionally powerful. I loved the element of familial love, as well as the ideas of queer identity and faith and the way these all meld together. There was an element of grief and the way different people grieve, especially as the world burns around them, and I loved to see it. I have been recommending this book to everyone who comes into the bookstore!

I am a huge fan of Julia Armfield and this is her most ambitious and intriguing novel yet about the endurance of humanity and normality, even in the face of global climate disaster and, perhaps, a suspicious cult lurking in the background. Centred around three sisters, and riffing off King Lear, Armfield's writing is both fantastical and a brilliant exploration of humanity composed with addictive and beautiful prose. None of her characters are hugely likeable and yet you find yourself so invested in their lives, and the pervasive fear and horror that this engenders means that you can devour this book in only a few sittings. I read this book during the rainiest summer we have had in a while and it felt portentous, especially as we continue to ignore the ongoing climate crisis, however, what I really loved was her exploration of how three sisters cope so differently with their grief, past family traumas, and the challenges and pain of struggling to connect with one another. I love this book and I cannot wait to read anything that Armfield can produce next!

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Julia Armfield writes some peculiar stories and this, latest, one is as strange as any. It is about three sisters, Agnes, Isla and Irene, their individual relationships with their father, their shared recollections of a dead mother, and the ties which have oddly bound them all their lives.

All of these events are played out against the background of climatic change, endless rainfall and the possible ending of civilisation as the cities flood. The father, Stephen Carmichael, a famous architect, who designed a family house and much of the city in a way which was allegedly resistant to floods, and who attempted to control his daughters rather as he did floodwater, dies. The sisters have to pick up the pieces, review their lives and wonder why they have been like that. Have they always had free will or have they somehow been watched and prepared for something? Their reflections on their various and conjoined pasts indicate something not quite right but they can't imagine how sinister the truth is.

There's a connection with Shakespeare's King Lear in all of this. An old monarch still trying to rule and control the floodwaters, three sisters groomed for some odd purpose, a madman on the loose and the social order falling apart - but the connections are slippery and hard to track.

The ending is as horrific as it is unexpected as the truth emerges, but the old order has to be destroyed for that to happen.

It's an excellent read.

I have to admit that for the first 40 pages or so of this book, I really struggled to get into the narrative or identify with the characters. However, it was 100% worth persevering, as the tension grew and grew through the course of the novel, building to a crescendo and propelling you through the book. The sisters‘ relationships with each other, with their father and with their partners was fascinating, raw and beautifully depicted. I loved seeing how Armfield displays how childhood traumas send shockwaves through adult life and relationships. The postapocalyptic element was also very interesting, but I enjoyed how it lurked in the background adding to the overall sense of unease. I highly recommend this book!

It's no secret that this was my most anticipated book of the year and that I had expected it to be my favourite book ever... was it? no. were my expectations too high? I fear they were.

Julia Armfield is an incredible novelist and writes about grief, sisterhood, womanhood and melancholy in a way that resonates with me so deeply; that was no different with this book. So much of this was eloquent, heart wrenching and painfully relatable and I did underline SO MANY quotes as my favourites.

As a novel though, I felt like so much of the apocalypse and end of the world state that the premise promised was missing. This book was incredibly quiet and subtle and whilst (from a narrative POV) I can understand why, it didn't make it any more of an enjoyable read. Dare I say I felt myself dragging my feet with it slightly. The last 50 pages for me were PERFECT and exactly what I wanted from this book ~ pretending that the rest was exactly like that, it would've been all I wanted and more.

Saying this though, I can acknowledge that my expectations were VERY high and perhaps that impacted my reading experience slightly. I would still definitely recommend this, especially if you have already established that you like Julia Armfield's writing!

I’m not a huge science fiction reader but I was really interested in Julia Arnfield as a writer, having heard about Our Wives Under the Sea but never having read it. But I thought this was wonderful and was up there with J G Ballard for me in maintaining that blend of the ordinary and the pettiness within life while also placing the novel in a time of apocalypse and chaos, Armfield has written a brilliant novel that this as much about sisterhood and the complex network of family ties as it is about living at the end of the world. There’s something uncannily realistic in particular about the fact that it’s so obviously at the end of the world and yet the characters continue working and bickering and dealing with the same human problems as before, I’ve rarely read something that I’ve had to put down as it’s made me feel so physically unsettled. A complex and wonderfully written book that I think will go down as one of the great climate change novels.

I absolutely adore Julia Armfield's writing. I loved Our Wives Under the Sea, and her short story collection, Salt Slow. As is typical with her style, Private Rites is beautifully evocative and visceral, with a focus on water throughout.

The world is in climate crisis and ravaged by rain. The setting is contemporary urban, but people have moved further above ground, living at the top of high-rise buildings. Three queer sisters reunite following the death of their father, to settle his estate and take what's theirs, and the focus becomes familial conflict as much as end of days.

Private Rites is haunting, unsettling, and beautifully written, with a closing chapter I found truly terrifying. A stunning read.

Unfortunately I'm in the list of people that didn't end up liking this book as much as Julia Armfield's debut Our Wives Under the Sea. I was stuck on it for weeks, I don't think the pacing worked that well.

Private Rites is a story about three sisters who have to come together to sort through the aftermath of their estranged father's death, set in a not so distant future where humanity have had to adapt to drastically risen water levels.

I loved Our Wives Under The Sea. It was my favourite read of 2022, so I had high hopes for this one and it didn't disappoint!
If you're not new here you'll know I love a story where the worse has already happened and it's like well, now what? I love reading about characters in nihilistic settings where they have to keep going because the only way out is through.

Like Our Wives, Private Rites is a haunting. The haunting grief of could've would've should've—if they were nicer to each other, if either mother was still alive, if their father wasn't a piece of shit—would the absence or addition of any of these things mean they would be a close family unit rather than the current cold estrangement they live with.

And the most interesting thing is...I don't think they would.
All three sisters just don't like each other. None of them are particularly nice, agreeable people that others would want to spend time around.
That's also why I liked the inclusion of The City's POV because it lets you get outside these people's brains for a while. It was like a little breather to offset that claustrophobia and to say oh yeah and remember while they're arguing over the petty minutiae, the world still continues no matter how hard people do or don't try to get along. Everything just keeps on turning for better or worse.


It's not really so much a post-apocalyptic book since everything continues going on, just differently and that realism is what makes it so intriguing to me. It seems these days like the world is constantly ending.
It's like an apocalypse where your boss texts you to say "yeah I saw the world ended but that's no excuse, you're still pencilled in for 8 tomorrow so I'll be seeing you then"

Which I think ties so well into the reoccurring theme in the book of cycles. It's as much (if not even more so imo) a story of the cyclical nature of abuse as it is about grief. How you were raised, good or bad haunts all your actions when you're grown and the way the effects of abuse trickle down through generations into every nook and cranny of your life.

After absolutely loving Our Wives Under The Sea by this author I was really excited to pick this up. While it didn't work for me, I can absolutely see how people are going to love this.
The three sisters central to this book are beautifully written, in only a few pages Armfield successfully created three distinct characters that the reader feels they know. Their relationships with each other are complex and interesting.
The book has a sense of dread that hovers like a fog as you read. This author creates atmosphere like no other author I've read!

Another excellent novel from Julia Armfield. This story of sisterhood and climate change is eerie and strange, the grief (or lack of such) of the loss of their father playing out to the backdrop on rising water levels and crumbling infrastructure.

I had high hopes for this as I loved Our Wives Under the Sea but I couldn’t really vibe with this one. I didn’t like how we were getting multiple perspectives per chapter instead of the chapters being split into POV’s. The sisters weren’t overly distinguishable from one another so I found myself getting confused a lot. Sadly a 2 star from me.

This latest tour de force from the Polari Prize-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea is another queer, sexy, flesh-crawling meditation on love and the things that bind us. Private Rites starts and ends with cultish rituals, but the action - if you'd call it that - mostly takes place during the last days of a civilisation that's already begun to melt away, with hints of Maggie Gee's 'The Flood,' Cloud Atlas and (the other David) Mitchell and Webb's 'The Quiz Broadcast,' sketches, ('Stay Indoors,'). Three queer sisters ('King Lear and his dyke daughters,') reckon with their architect father's legacy and try to avoid acknowledging that the end of the world doesn't make the petty irritations of life (serving coffee in a borderline-deserted shop, Zoom therapy sessions and the rough patches of a marriage) any less annoying.

Armfield has a searching quality to her writing that very few seem to have, and some points in which she really seems to be pushing the boundaries of how we write about love, sex and faith. There's a lot of faith in this book, and an internal monologue towards the end from the difficult world of spiky middle sister Irene as she contemplates God in the context of her relationship almost had me in tears. Like her first novel, this is horny, deranged, nightmarish and not infrequently funny.

Julia Armfield is a master-class in writing atmospheric, character-driven stories, and Private Rites is no difference. From the first word, I was captivated by the dynamic of Armfield's three sisters, all of whom are based on the sisters from Shakespeare's King Lear. Their frustrations, tenderness, pettiness toward each-other was so tangible and even before the dystopian setting set in (and Armfield's classic horror elements), I couldn't put this down. Come for the King Lear inspiration and the beautiful prose, stay for the fiery, vibrant characters and horror.

I just didn’t love this book as much as I wanted to! If your going in expecting our wives under the sea then stow away as it’s the very opposite still a beautiful story just not what I was expecting Julia’s work is brilliant and I do love her writing style this one just wasn’t for me

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I absolutely loved Armfield's previous novel - her writing is like nothing I've read before. However, this one didn't resonate with me as much, perhaps because of the complexity of the interweaving narratives, or perhaps because the ending came quite abruptly. I thought the relationships between the sisters were perfectly realised, and Armfield writes with such an overwhelming sense of dread that it's impossible to feel comfortable reading her novels. But I will definitely continue to do so!

Julia Armfield has a knack for deeply unsettling prose which gets under your skin.

In her latest novel, Armfield tells a ‘lesbian King Lear’. Her three narrator protagonists are the offspring of famous architect Stephen Carmichael, in a not too distant future where the UK is plagued with so much rain that there is perpetual flooding and housing must be raised from the ground.

Isla, Irene and Agnes are all estranged from their father, and to differing extents, each other. When he passes away, the three women are are forced to reconcile with their present, pasts and futures in a world that is increasingly unstable. Despite his death, Carmichael looms large in both the book and his daughter’s lives, symbolised in a grand glass house of his own design.

How do you come to terms with not only a death, but the death of someone with whom you have a deeply complex relationship when the world itself is also ending?

It’s not an easy question to answer and with their different perspectives, personalities and relationships to their father and each other the three sisters all deal with it very differently. Morals are thrown into question about their father’s legacy - while others lose their property and lives, Carmichael built his structures, very literally above everyone else. The legacy of the house is one none of the sisters want, but as the world crumbles around them, it could be their last hope.

Water and damp seep into every corner of this novel, making it deeply uncomfortable for not just the characters but the reader too. Armfield has already proved a master at conveying the horrors of the ocean in her previous novel, Our Wives Under the Sea but here, it isn’t just the ocean but incessant rain and rising water levels which threaten everyone’s existence.

Alongside their relationships with their father, all three sisters are navigating queer love and relationships in different stages, with divorce, a long term relationship and burgeoning romance all featuring amongst them.

As a speculative horror alongside a Shakespeare retelling, exploring wider themes of death and mourning, sexuality and climate crisis, Private Rites is of course far more complex than her previous work, and perhaps due to that, the novel feels loose. This sense of unravelling is partially related to the events of the novel, but it also is a symptom of the way the narrative bounces between the sisters, making it feel less cohesive.

Yet Private Rites operates on a larger scale to Our Wives, and it shows that even in the midst of the tragedy of the world ending, it’s the personal which is still the most profoundly tragic.

Armfield is so great at getting under the skin of her characters and really transporting you to the word she has created. It’s eerie and disquieting and the tension ramps up, very believable near future.

Julia Armfield has become one of my favourite authors. Her prose wrenches your most inner fears and desires outwards, laying them bare on the page so beautifully. These characters — their emotions, interactions, and introspection — felt so often like a reflection that sometimes I had to pause, because it was as though Armfield had somehow put into words an experience I had considered to be abstract and intangible.
Unrivalled in creating an atmosphere and setting that feels familiar yet itchingly strange, Armfield’s second novel carries all the trepidation of a world existing through climate apocalypses while also grounding this in a story that at its core is about connection and mis/understanding. The sisters’ relationships with each other were strikingly recognisable, and thus frequently haunting, and I really felt situated in this damp world. Though the ending took me by surprise and left me scrambling for more, I think Private Rites might be my favourite novel of the year so far.