Our Wives Under the Sea was a surprise smash hit with my students last year and I know they will be just as excited for this new beautifully relatable story.

After reading Armfield’s novel ‘Our Wives Under The Sea’, I felt my life changed, and upon hearing of this as the next release I had very high hopes! Armfield yet again depicted a story that eloquent and purposeful, and heart wrenchingly relatable. It isn’t a fast paced book by any means but after the establishing pages the book find its rhythm, and once I was going I didn’t want it to end until I found myself at the last 60ish pages and had to brace myself for the finish and having to out the book down! Julia Armfield has yet again asserted herself on my list of authors I will read anything from due to how incredible their writing is, and Private Rites did not disappoint me or my very high hopes!

I raced through this sitting in our campervan in Sweden in the pouring rain, and it almost felt as if I was living in Armfield’s end of the world realm. Like in ‘Our Wives under the Sea’ there’s loads of water here; high water, floods and endless rain, caused by climate change. There’s queer love here again as well. And some dystopian horror elements that give the book once again just a bit of extra thrill. A frightful book about sisterhood and love set in an apocalyptic world.
Thank you Fourth Estate and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

I was a big fan of Armfield’s short story collection, and though less enamoured with ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’, still enjoyed it. This, however, was a highly anticipated novel for me, and one I’m disappointed to say fell short of my expectations. It felt longer than its short length, and suffered from pacing issues - a slow burn until the last 10% or so, which hurtled at breakneck speed to a conclusion that felt crowbarred in, both predictable and like a hurried twist despite previous breadcrumbs dropped. I’m a fan of ‘unlikeable’ characters but even I baulked at at the beginning here; the three sister are so at odds with each other, spiky and dealing with trauma, which worked the further I got into the book, when we see more of them outside of their sisterly relationships, which bring out the worst in them, and glimpse their soft underbellies, but their first few interactions were so caustic and off-putting I could see this turning a different reader off. Armfield writes romantic relationships and love beautifully, but it felt to the detriment of several other elements in this novel - the setting, end-of-the-world cults, and even the sisters grief - which should have been a huge driving force- felt left by the wayside for the focus on Irene and Agnes’s romances. Had this been the sole focus of the book I’d have felt less disappointed, but there was a lot crammed in here that it jarred when some elements were only just touched upon. The ‘city’ portions of the book were brilliant, and I’d have loved a lot more focus on this - it feels like Armfield has missed a trick by leaving this vivid, rain-flooded London (or a similar city) in the background. There were also one or two instances of characters 'forgetting umbrellas' - which did stretch my belief if near permanent rain is their day to day reality. I’m also not quite sure the split POV’s work as successfully as they could've - as with ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ the characters feel a little too similar in voice, and there are one off POV’s for two of the sisters' love interests that felt shoehorned in as a solution to a tricky perspective moment. Armfield’s prose is always gorgeous, but it often felt intrusive here, and there are multiple instances of dropped articles and slightly overcrowded metaphors that feel like a hangover from her short story days. I will say that I’ll still read whatever Armfield produces next, as her concepts are always fascinating and her prose is lovely, but having read two of her novels now, I can’t help but hope it’s a return to short stories, which, for me, is where her real strength lies.

Another brilliant read from Armfield who is fast becoming a go-to author for queer gothic horror. She deftly juggles the story of a dysfunctional family, set against the rising tides of climate disaster and our will to look away from that might endanger us most. A brilliant novel - I can't wait to read what she writes next.

Julia Armfield's Private Rites is a haunting and lyrical exploration of family dynamics, queer love, and faith set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic world. The novel follows sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes as they reunite to mourn their estranged father's death—a man renowned for his architectural feats in a world reshaped by incessant rain and flooding.

Armfield masterfully weaves themes of climate catastrophe into the narrative, though they remain subtle and understated, allowing the story's focus to remain on the intricate and often strained relationships between the sisters. The atmospheric prose beautifully captures the bleakness of their reality, as well as the eerie and magnetic pull of their father's grand glass house, a symbol of both his legacy and the mysterious circumstances surrounding their mother's disappearance.

As the sisters delve deeper into their past and the enigmatic strangers who have always shadowed their lives, they uncover a purpose with profound implications for their family and the world at large. Private Rites is a worthwhile read, delivering a melancholic yet compelling meditation on grief, connection, and the haunting remnants of a world on the brink of collapse.

A very involving and absorbing novel about three sisters living their lives in a near future where water is threatening to subsume their city. The sisters are under the shadows of what happened to their mothers and the legacy of what their father has left behind after his recent death.

There is very sinister tone about the current environment, about society and about living their own lives in a disintegrating world. Events of the past catch up with the sisters and set them on a frightening path towards acceptance and forgiveness, with some jarring moments along the way.

Fascinating, revealing and thought-provoking from Armfield as ever.

I was so engrossed in the story of Private Rites that I read it in under 24 hours, barely pausing for breaks. I adored every single aspect of this book, and it pretty much immediately became a new favourite as soon as I finished! Although it is set against the backdrop of a climate catastrophe signalling the end of the world, the apocalyptic setting is diminished, becoming a mundane triviality rather than a disaster of utmost urgency, which I found to be a highly intriguing and unique twist on the dystopian and speculative genres. Instead, the conflict between the characters, three sisters navigating the death of their father amid a slow burning crisis, takes centre stage, and I utterly adored the explorations of grief, as well as the themes of queerness and desire that are interwoven throughout the narrative in such a detailed and nuanced way. Armfield excels at creating a melancholic tone through her vivid descriptions of the endless rain seeping through and pervading every aspect of life, conjuring an atmosphere of quiet but unsettling tragedy. Furthermore, I found her depictions of everyday life fascinating as, with the central three characters dealing with relationships colleagues, flatmates and family at work and home, she presents a world that, despite the vastly different situations, is not so different from our own.

I would highly recommend this book, and I would be very keen to read anything Julia Armfield writes in the future.

So brilliant! Moving and strange, weaving together the stories of three sisters in the aftermath of their father’s death, with the wider environmental collapse surrounding them.

'Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realising that one has company.'

Julia Armfield’s debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was one of my top ten books of 2022, so it’s not surprising that I found her second, Private Rites, a bit disappointing in comparison. Private Rites follows three queer sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, as they face the slow dissolving of their world in the face of climate chaos. Rain is almost constant and floods are increasingly common, but like the Canadians in Fort McMurray who dropped off their dry-cleaning as a catastrophic wildfire was approaching, the sisters continue living their everyday lives, working at coffee shops, offering therapy sessions and negotiating romantic relationships. The event that ruptures their world is not a tsunami nor a maelstrom but the death of their distant architect father and their revisiting of the house he designed himself, which is ‘both transparent and impenetrable’. ‘It was built to rise above water… strung with ribbon windows that run to fifty feet on either side, it streams from north to south as a single linear form… Its legs are mechanical, extending as necessary to match the rising water levels… Easy to watch the water lap against the bottom of the windows and miss the fact that the house is rising higher to account for this encroachment’. Honestly, it sounds a bit like Halley VI.

The house the sisters inherit is a tremendous metaphor for the world they live in, and Armfield’s writing is as brilliant as ever. She is so good at writing both emotion and description, at making us feel many different kinds of rain. For me, though, Private Rites felt too diffuse. It obviously lacks the taut plot-thread that led us through Our Wives, but that in itself wouldn’t have been a problem for me; I think writing a great plot is much harder than we’re led to believe, but I’ve also enjoyed many a plotless book. What I struggled with was the way we dance between the sisters’ points of view and even once, into the heads of two of their partners. Irene was the only sister who really comes into full focus, as Isla and Agnes fail to move beyond the stock roles they are forced to play (Isla->older sister->emotionally closed->needs to be in control; Agnes->younger sister->free spirit->scared of commitment->frustrates her older sisters with her scattiness). And even Irene felt hard to grasp hold of because we are constantly being whisked away from her as soon as we connect with her. I would have loved Armfield to have trapped the sisters in the house, together, earlier on in the book. Although Private Rites is a much better novel, the scattering of its cast reminded me a little of Coco Mellor’s Blue Sisters, which only really worked for me when all the living sisters were in the same room.

Private Rites has been framed as more ambitious than Our Wives Under The Sea, even if it’s not totally successful, but while I’d agree that this is an ambitious novel, I think that assessment underplays just how good Our Wives is. As I wrote at the time, it’s so, so difficult to achieve that kind of crossover between literary and speculative fiction, and to write an ending as powerful as the ending of Our Wives, which brings both strands together. It looks simple because it tells an old story about strange monsters in the deep, but its straightforwardness hides its accomplishment. Private Rites, in contrast, is not a horror novel, and not meant to be. It aims for the same kind of emotional-speculative intertwining in its climax, but it felt too sudden, and fell short. Having said that, though, I’m still a huge Armfield fan. This book was worth reading for the line I quoted at the start of this review alone, but it’s also, despite its unevenness, the best account of everyday apocalypse I’ve ever encountered. 3.5 stars.

I think this book should become a modern classic. The way Armfield depicts dystopian London is astonishing. The city is rendered so cleary and eerily, so ominously realistic. The addition of the city’s perspective really upped the sense of foreboding. I loved the way that the weather mirrors the changes and escalation in the sisters’ lives. That ending too!

Julia Armfield is unquestionably a great writer. Unfortunately, this book didn't grip me and the longer I stuck with it, the more I started finding the characters irritating and the story uninteresting. Super disappointed as I heard such great things about Armfield's debut (and still plan to give it a chance) but this follow up simply isn't for me.

🌊 REVIEW 🌊

Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Published 11th June! Out now!!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

📝 - It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, they find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway. As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it.

💭 - I’ll start this by saying I haven’t read Our Wives Under the Sea yet (don’t come at me I’m sorry), so I went into this somewhat blind to the writing style/themes Armfield uses, apart from what I’d gathered from other reviews. This was definitely an eerie, tense novel, and I enjoyed the fact that, while there were some elements of horror, it wasn’t overpowering or unrealistic. I think each of the sisters were very well developed throughout, and their relationships, despite complexities, were relatable and well-thought out. Undebatably great writing, but did I understand everything that happened and its symbolism/meaning… no. Did I still really enjoy it? Yes!
(I also like that Armfield has such a connection with writing about water, as I saw her say in an interview, and thought the speculative setting was very well done too)

#juliaarmfield #privaterites #bookreview #bookrecommendations #bookreviewer #bookreviews #speculativefiction #literaryfiction #lgbtfiction #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks #bookstagrammer

Thank you to 4th Estate via NetGalley for the eARC of this novel.

She's done it again. Private Rites was one of my most anticipated reads of 2024, since both Our Wives and her short story collection Salt Slow both gained 5 stars from me. Armfield is an incredibly damp writer, and I mean that fairly literally - all of her writing is infused with this sense of permeability. Nothing is watertight in her sinister, barnacled world. This is as true of Private Rites as it is Our Wives Under the Sea. Private Rites imagines a not-so-distant future London which is filling up with water, the rain unrelenting and forcing people to move higher up, getting from place to place by water taxi. Despite this fairly enormous upheaval, little else has changed; people still go to work, still pay their rent, still squabble with their partners.

In this world, we meet the Carmichael sisters, Isla, Irene, and their younger half-sister, Agnes. After their father, an incredibly harsh patriarch and celebrated architect, passes away, the three sisters find themselves in each other's company after a long period of estrangement. The sisters aren't exactly likeable - infuriatingly antagonistic, self-involved and abrasive, particularly the older two, the Regan and Goneril of this light-touch queer King Lear. I'll confess I was worried about the Lear-yness of it, given that it's probably my least favourite Shakespeare and I've been known to zone out fully mid-production. This book is more about gesturing towards Lear than replicating it, however, and I did like how Armfield managed to replicate that eerie, post-collapse feeling that Lear has.

Armfield has described the apocalypse of this novel as a 'mundane' one, and whilst that certainly is the case - life is very much business as usual - Armfield remains a horror writer. Private Rites reads like one of those particularly insidious nightmares where the threat lurks in your peripheral business, but refuses to reveal itself. The kind of nightmare that sticks with you - the going about your business as things fall out of the sky in the distance. Alarms go off, but no one knows what they signify; houses slide down hills and collapse in a matter of days. Throughout the novel, you get that nightmarish feeling of frustration with the characters, like trying to flee a burning building but your legs refuse to move.

It feels disingenuous to call this novel dystopian in anyway - it feels so achingly plausible. Armfield cleverly, though perhaps a touch heavy-handedly at points, draws on our experiences of the pandemic to build her apocalypse - characters hunker down together, work from home with unreliable internet connections, arrange futile protests whilst the wealthy remain safe and warm. I think we'd all like to think we'd be a bit more proactive in a crisis like this, but Armfield's decision to draw on the pandemic in that way calls us out - no we wouldn't, we're extremely good at adapting to a new normal. It's a climate crisis novel, obviously, deriving its eeriness less from the crisis than the human inertia in the face of it.

The novel is of course, beautifully written, biting when it needs to be but retaining its soft underside, which it only shows in a few merciful glimpses. The characters are incredibly flawed, but hard to truly dislike. It is their jarring personalities, in fact, that throw their moments of tenderness into such sharp relief.

I imagine this one won't have as much broad appeal as Our Wives Under the Sea, but in my eyes it's Armfield's strongest offering yet.

Armfield’s characteristic use of water imagery seeped into every layer of the story and I loved the pervasive darkness and the slow building undertow of threat. The different perspectives and the voice of the city worked beautifully to layer explorations of grief, trauma, queer love and familial expectations. Raw, immersive and atmospheric, an absolute stunner that will stay with me for a long time.

I loved Our Wives Under the Sea by Armfield but I have come to the conclusion that she is definitely an author where the reader has to be in the right frame of mind.
Private Rites tells the story of three sisters in the aftermath of their father's death and how they deal with the grief they feel. I just felt a little too sad reading this and was not in the mood for a character driven novel with weird vibes. Maybe another time, I would have enjoyed it!

I think I'm settling at a 3.5 stars on this one. It was gorgeously written, just like Our Wives Under the Sea, and just like that previous book, water and queerness are prevalent themes. This is cli-fi rather than horror, although it does have a unique eeriness to it. The rain is constant - to the point that how humans live has had to alter drastically. Cults of varying degrees have sprung up here and there to essentially pray the rain away. And three sisters suffer the bereavement of their father - a man who enabled human society to continue in the current climate crisis with his architectural inventions. All of which sound promising but the outre elements are used mostly as window dressing for a story about a toxic man who enjoyed setting his daughters at odds with each other. This is King Lear with three queer daughters trying to find some balance after his death rearranges their universe. Armfield does interpersonal drama really well and I found the story engaging but it is quite low plot and the characters are all awful in their own way. All in all, I liked it but if you're looking for lots of substance rather than lots of style, this may not be for you.

Stories about womanhood, sisterhood and grief will always draw me in, and Armfield writes it in such a way that I couldn't stop reading.

My expectations for this were sky high, and I was (perhaps) expecting a little more from the "end of the world" aspect of this book, in saying that the last 20% of this had me unable to put the book down.

Despite the end of the world aspect going differently, it was also more real and raw than what I had imagined in my mind, and after a while reading it, the story was even more than I could have expected.

This may have been the first Julia Armfield novel I have read but it will not be the last. An absolutely spectacular novel. The writing drew me in such much it was luxurious in quality. Genuinely breath taking. One of the best books I have read for a long time.

Absolutely loved this. Julia Armfield is an amazing talent, she has become an auto buy author for me. The characters are the best part. The dynamic between the sisters is everything, They are each such distinct personalities that navigate the ever changing world so differently. The differing chapter povs allows for the world to develop clearly and naturally. Especially the city pov, it adds so much to the story.