I loved Our Wives Under the Sea and thought Julia had a lot to live up to… but Private Rites was even better! It draws stark observations on society, politics and the environment which reflect our own times. Beautiful prose, poetic at times, and shapely drawn characters. The best book I’ve read this year. Armfield is undoubtedly one of the best writers of our generation.

Another weird, wonderful, waterlogged work from Armfield, who is fast becoming one of my must-read authors. The numbness and detachment in the face of calamity is so clever and compelling.

My first experience of Julia Armfield's writing and the eerie sense of catastrophe that flows through her writing, just eking out enough space to make it uncomfortable really had me hooked.

A queer take on King Lear, where three sisters Irene, Isla and Agnes battle with their relation to one another. An imposed sisterhood that not one of them knows how to deal with, set against the backdrop of a drowning world where disaster is impending but the expected panic is rather, well...absent.

Rising waters has left society vapid and whilst some seek alternative ways of living, cults to focus their hopes on, the sisters somewhat drift in and out of anger, fear and resentment not knowing where it will take them.

Armfield's writing is dark and witty which is why I remained so hooked throughout, she's masterful in her prose mimicking the gradual seeping of water into society until the pressure is just enough to tip the scale.

Julia Armfield’s newest book was beautiful, 3 sisters stuck in mundane grief at the end of the world. I felt a sense of fluidity and constant motion, mirroring the inner turmoil and unresolved grief of the sisters. Each of the three sisters is portrayed with such depth and nuance that their individual and collective struggles become deeply personal to the reader. Climate dysptopia goes wrong so often for me but armfield and her tendency towards watery rhetoric works so well for my soul that always misses the sea.


[full instagram reel review pending]

Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time but are forced to reconnect when their estranged father dies. They must navigate their grief in a world that has not stopped raining for a long time. When they reconnect, clearing the grand glass house of their father’s belongings, something sinister seems to be unfolding.

The prose is just… utterly indescribable. Honestly. The way Julia Armfield can write leaves me speechless and in awe in equal measures. The descriptions are so vivid and close that it almost feels claustrophobic, like you are trapped in the rainstorms, but also so expansive that it feels real, like this couldn’t possibly be dystopian. I don’t know how to put this into words, so I’m just going to hope I’m making sense (I know I’m not).

My favourite part of this novel, and the part which is going to stick with me for a long time, is the relationship between the three sisters, how their dynamic changes based on their relationships with each other, and how horribly nasty people can be when they’re so close to someone, like a sister. It was a fascinating dynamic to read as this dynamic changes through the different stages of their grief, and based on whether they share a mother and father or just a father.

Publishes on June 6th - really looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks of this one.

4.25 stars

Private Rites follows Isla and Irene, two sisters in their thirties, and their younger half-sister Agnes, in her early twenties, in a very near future where it has been raining for over a decade and most parts of the world are entirely flooded. The population largely refuses to address this problem head on, still dutifully commuting to work on ferries, paying their rent, and living in the upper floors of high-rise buildings. Many of the rich live in custom-built buildings on higher hills where the "ground" still exists as a concept. The sisters' largely-estranged father was an architect who designed these buildings, and his death precipitates the plot and the sisters trying (or avoiding) to reconnect with each other.

This is a very quiet novel and I really enjoyed the atmosphere, the rain feels very present both in the way the characters acknowledge it and the way they don't. It is mostly a slice of life with the added drama of the sisters navigating relationships between each other and their partners. There is however a slight creepy mystery surrounding Agnes - who was her mother and why does she seem to be being watched?

It's the slice of life and relationships that I most enjoyed about this book; in the last 20 pages or so the book suddenly goes from 0 to 100 and a development that I wasn't massively expecting happens. It felt like I had started reading a completely new book and I don't think I really liked the sudden shift and change in pace.

As a quiet but ever-present climate apocalypse novel, this was excellent and is one of my favourites of the year for that. The writing was so good, Armfield is really a master of her craft. The ending does bring down my rating as it felt out of place for me and doesn't fit with my own interpretation of the book.

"Attempting to recall when it was that people realised the emergency was already upon them, the warning signs noted then duly forgotten in favour of squabbling about small things, about taxes and football championships and protests that caused offence or caused traffic, of doggedly ploughing a course."

A creepy, haunting release from the ever talented Julia Armfield. Well crafted, difficult to put down.

'Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap.’

We oughtn’t to be saying that Julia Armfield is ‘bestselling’; we ought to be saying she is indispensable. I’m unabashedly an acolyte, and in ‘Private Rites’, Armfield makes you do just the right amount of work as her reader - you’ve got to cross half the distance between you and the author to meet her there on the page, in her forbidding, occulty, end-is-nigh cataclysm novel.

Similar to the way in which Armfield most giftedly reshaped Classical narratives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her short story collection ‘Salt Slow’, in the catastrophic ‘Private Rites’ she recasts Shakespeare’s three-sisters motif with fluid originality:

‘It occurs to [Isla] that there was always one shitty witch in Macbeth, the one that never says anything useful and always just seems to be filling in space between the other two. Most of the time she feels like this witch is Irene, although sometimes it’s Agnes and sometimes it’s all of them, which doesn’t really make sense but still feels fundamentally accurate.’

To explore the three sisters’ experiences, Armfield invites her readers to wear Isla, to put on Irene, to step into Agnes; to inhabit them each tactilely, bodily. Armfield wants her reader to arrive at her characters’ psychology through their physicality. The characters’ thoughts are expressed through their felt senses: ‘[Irene] looks at her sister, the square chin and long green eyes, the way she holds her head like something heavy she is trying to carry back from the supermarket with both hands already full’; ‘[their] mother, pushing Irene’s face into the water when she combed her hair for nits; the eternity of seconds during which Irene believed she’d never let her up.’

Agnes's character portrait, especially, is at once heartbreaking and hot; confusing and irresistible:

‘After she’s gone, Agnes isn’t quite sure what to do with herself, settling at first for pulling off her jeans and t-shirt and walking the flat in a wide circle, stopping in the centre to tilt back on her heels and then resettle before putting the t-shirt back on again. She feels odd, prickled over, the comedown combined with a feeling like skin being removed from hot water; shrink and tingle, the sweat through the lines of her palms.’

Perhaps the ‘Queer Lear’ label that Irene’s gives them is more apposite than Isla’s comparison with Macbeth’s Weird Sisters, though, since ‘Private Rites’ welcomes an interpretation that spotlights the tragedy of family betrayal and the sisters’ dysfunctional dynamic with their father: ‘“King Lear and his dyke daughters,” Irene said, and then wished she hadn’t.’ Of course, Armfield’s authentic representation of women who love women (‘“So you got serious because someone died in front of you and now you're going on a minibreak to a funeral. That's the gayest thing I've ever heard.”’) goes hand in hand with her supreme understanding of the meaningful lived experience:

‘It has been so many years – a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends, and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention – exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.’

As in her previous works, she calls to Western art and literature to speak for shared experiences, as when, reflecting upon suffering, Isla tries to recall what W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ says in its response to the painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Bruegel about human suffering:

‘how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The point, of course, being the whole bright dailiness of agony, the way Icarus in the Bruegel painting could crash to earth as little but a background detail while the bland spool of life went on in the foreground; the ploughman at his plough and the fabric of the day untouched, uninterrupted.’

On top of that, reading ‘Private Rites’, I felt again as I have with Armfield’s previous books - that sense of poetry in her prose: ‘The evening struggles, darkness borne down heavy and replete. The rain falls, the night continues - black horizon and the pull of what's beneath.’ I think her acuity with the English language is what most earns ‘Private Rites’ a comparison with Shakespeare. And with that: the novel’s scope, its new world, uncanny within familiar bounds; the inter-relatedness of characters, including with their environment by means of pathetic fallacy; Armfield’s lyricism and downright unearthly skill with figurative language (‘sometimes she pictured her mother spreading across her like lichen, like something resembling skin’; ‘Isla snorts, puts her hand to her mouth as if to prevent something falling out, worries it might be her heart and swallows’).

Shakespearean in style then, but also in tone: I’d say overall that ‘Private Rites’ is clipped (and this is all tied up with the work Armfield invites her reader to undertake in order to meet her halfway – forgive me if I’m waffling). The novel moves from the surreal viewpoint of one sister to the dismal viewpoint of another abruptly, signifying the way – in this overwrought dystopia – that every character’s lifetime is soon to be cut short. And that brings us to the crucial point of the novel: inheritance. The sisters’ varied paternal inheritances; their own legacies about to be terminated. That’s to say nothing of the final scene, and what’s been passed down through maternal lines. But this curtness – who can inherit from the sisters at the end of the world after all? – signals the inevitability in the novel. I’ve never felt split narrative pulling me through a novel with such immediacy before.

Julia Armfield writes this inevitability as both graceful and devastating. At the halfway point in the narrative, she artfully swings her reader out from relatively still (though apocalyptic) waters and into darker depths. Yet what can I say, other than experiencing it, about this ‘whole great impending somethingness’ (in the author’s own words) that pitches in, takes on heft, and swells and builds, insinuating. The full picture of this looming horror that has happened, or is happening, or will happen, materialises as you read; as each of Isla’s, Irene’s, and Agnes’s experiences intersect to make a singular comprehensible whole: ‘there is only one way back to the path.’

And throughout all, even this, there is the inexpressible joy of the reader at feeling so confidently kept and held by the author and the integrity of her writing. An ARC of ‘Private Rites’ might’ve just made my reading year! Deep, deep thanks to 4th Estate and William Collins for the joy and delight of getting to read an ARC of ‘Private Rites’.

I started this book twice because it sounded so intriguing, and because it has been raining solidly for the last two days so felt I was in the right frame of mind and environment. I enjoyed the writing, the intrigue and sibling rivalry but sadly for me it lacked a hook to keep me reading. I haven't read "our wives under the sea" but maybe I will as Mx Armfield obviously has some very loyal readers and I feel I'm probably missing something quite profound which I'm sure many others will enjoy.
Thank you to netgalley and 4th Estate for an advance copy of this book.

Our Wives Under the Sea was one of my absolute favourite reads of 2023, so naturally, I was incredibly excited to pick up Private Rites as soon as humanly possible.

We follow three estranged sisters, two of which are of similar ages, with the youngest of the three subsequently having been born to a different mother over a decade later. The setting is one in the midst of climate catastrophe, which seems both dystopian and distant, and yet eerily plausible. It won't stop raining. Venice has long since disappeared, an almost myth in our protagonist's timelines, and most people are now living in urban areas, with rural settings settled mostly underwater.

Our sisters are pulled out of their everyday lives following a tragic event that draws them back together, and we witness them falling back into old, destructive patterns without missing a beat. The relationships between the sisters are what drives the narrative, particularly their charged interactions, and their repulsion for each other which juxtaposes beautifully with their penchant for clinging to each other, too.

This is a queer novel within which we read references to King Lear, and we find ourselves drawn into themes of climate catastrophe coupled with family dynamics.

And so much water. Which is of course what Armfield does best. This novel is so atmospheric, so lyrical, so strange and so compelling.

While the narrative feels less linear, and to me doesn't quite live up to my expectations following Our Wives, I devoured this novel whole, and can't wait to read what Armfield writes next.

Julia Armfield is an auto-buy for me at this point, and Private Rites did not disappoint. Was hooked from the moment Isla overhears the conversation about Magnolia Trees (iykyk). Atmospheric, complicated, disconcerting as heck. Read it in two sittings.

A very believable imaginative read. Rather a sad depiction of sibling rivalry caused by a father more interested in his career than his family.

‘Private Rites’ contains many incredibly quotable reflections on life under the pressures of a drowning world. As always, Julia's writing is exquisite, and the way she writes dialogue in particular is some of the most realistic and easy-flowing I've ever read.

I’d like to echo what many reviewers have said: this book is very different from what the synopsis implies. It leans more towards literary fiction than speculative/horror for the majority, with a significant focus on the dynamics of the sisters' relationships with one another and others who cross their paths.

I tend to have a hit-or-miss relationship with literary fiction, and since much of this book centres on the relationship between the sisters and their day-to-day lives following their father's death, I found myself struggling to get through some parts. The incessant conflict between the sisters bogged me down a bit in the first half, but this is likely just a product of my own mindset and should by no means put anyone off reading it.

This book is very different from Our Wives Under the Sea, which, for some, will be a good thing. For others, myself included, it may lead to this not being what you're expecting (don’t get me wrong I still really liked this book). The pacing felt a little disjointed to me for the first two-thirds, with it ramping up significantly in the last third. In retrospect, I can see how this may have been an intentional choice to add to the unsettling feelings.

The setting is so realistic yet unsettling. I love how Julia illustrated the atmosphere of a future world different yet eerily similar to our own, so well in fact that I often forgot the world was drowning while people went about their seemingly mundane lives.

The ending is one of those that will likely make or break the book for many people. For me personally, the ending took me by surprise in the best way and led me to skim through the whole novel again in search of references and comments that had definitely gone over my head the first time, perhaps owing to the fact that I read this book mostly in a daze before bed. It's definitely worth making sure your brain is fully switched on when reading this book to take in all the clever things that Julia does in her writing.

Lastly, it should go without saying, but I also, of course, loved the abundant queerness, which, in my opinion, paired with Julia's writing, is reason enough to pick this one up.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-arc. All opinions are my own.

Privates Rites again combines Armfield’s apparent love of water with her descriptive literary fiction to create a fascinating yet terrifying read. We look at the relationship between three sisters and a world that’s is going through an ‘apocalypse’ - albeit a new type of one. The rain hasn’t stopped for seemingly years and everything is wet or underwater. Infrastructure is failing and Armfield once again finds hope and solace in a bleak future.

The writing is superb, and I liked this book more than Our Wives Under the Sea. It had an unpredictable ending with twists of religion, politics, and departmentalism - amazingly stuck in real actions and doubts if the time. How would *we* react? Probably something like this! Would we create a new fangled way of living to cope with our changing world? Or would we desperately try and keep some semblance of society and bury our heads in the sand in the face of utter bleakness and an enemy that we cannot stop?

Private Rites builds Julia Armfield’s writing into probably her best work yet. Gripping, tense, and bleak, we learn to find hope with each other.

Thanks to 4th Estate for this advance copy.

Our Wives Under the Sea was my favourite read of 2022, so when Private Rites dropped into my inbox: I knew I must devour it immediately. Devour I did, and it did not disappoint. Julia Armfield is a creative genius, and writes this quite mundane version of the apocalypse with such mastery.

Private Rites is a sort of ‘lesbian Lear’ - three sisters going about their lives as the water rises and the world floods around them. The world is full of simmering discontent with class divides (the rich living in bourgeois houses in places of higher elevation, and the poor in the top floor of half flooded high-rises), but there is unfinished business and bitterness between Isla, Irene, and Agnes. The three sisters reunite after their father, a wealthy architect, dies. We get to see them battle grief, and reconfigure their relationship with each other, all while the water keeps rising…

This book felt damp, like how your clothes cling to your skin after being caught in the rain - heavy and cold. It was SO atmospheric, and I found myself unable to put it down, curious to see what happened next. The relationships between the sisters was also amazing - such vivid characters that you love but loathe, and simultaneously relate to them all.

Another banger from Armfield, and I eagerly await to read everything she writes in the future.

I was absolutely thrilled to be approved for this so thank you to NetGalley and the publisher!

I love Julia Armfield and I knew I would read and love whatever she wrote next.

Private Rites is a very loose King Lear adaption with 3 sisters dealing with the death of their architect father.

But it takes place in a not-too-distant future where most of the world is covered in water and their father designed houses for the rich to survive the flooding.

Julia Armfield loves watery descriptions and it was the perfect setting for her. But for me I wasn’t really interested in the city or what happened, I was here for the sisters and their stories.

It took me a while to separate out the 3 sisters, maybe because Isla and Irene are such similar names, but I loved the multiple perspectives.

The ending was completely unexpected and I’m still not sure I got it, but it was a real surprise change of pace.

I didn’t love this as much as Our Wives Under the Sea but it is similar in theme and sure to be a huge hit.

PRIVATE RITES is Julia Armfield's exploration of the end of the world lived in the mundane; Armfield's apocalypse if very much not a bang, but a whimper, a pot left simmering as you remain unsure of when it'll come to a boil. She interrogates the limits of what people will get used to, and put up with, and the way The End Of Days™ can come across as a series of end of days as we knew them. A series of changes of circumstances, of quiet tragedies that ring all too familiar to the now, and so the reader can easily see them transposed onto the slightly dystopian scene without needing any significant suspension of disbelief on their part. There are sequences that ring particularly true in the wake of a post 2020 world, so much so that they had me reread them to myself time and time again in a quick succession, then reading them out loud to my friend as we waited to board our plane. The brief interlude chapters from the city breaking up our three protagonists' POVs are lyrical and fuzzy in a late-night dreamlike kind of way.
When it comes to the three characters, I found it difficult to pick favourites, and found myself swayed each time we met or came back to another sisters' perspective. Where Armfield excels in many ways is in her deep understanding of and compassion for the human experience; her ability to dig to the heart and guts of things, and deliver characters that are messy, and honest (or as honest to you as they are to themselves) and raw. The honesty of each character rang true to my bones. I knew these women. If I looked just right, I could see facets of myself reflected in these women. It is this tender, yet brutal authenticity that makes it so easy to dive fully into their stories, to believe each of their thought processes, to live each of their quiet devastations with them, to spiral or float alongside depending on the tide.
It's not often that a reader is willing to abandon questions of action, plot or world (especially with a book that invites so many) in favour of merely following along with the characters and sinking into the whirlpool of their thoughts, but it takes little effort to do so with PRIVATE RITES. If possible, I think this'd make for a stellar reading experience if consumed in one go, yet it loses none of its appeal or bite when read in small chunks of time stolen here and there as was my case. I'm already dying to get a physical copies into my hands and annotate it to no end.

I previously read Our Wives Under the Sea and found it both gripping and unsettling in a way that made it stay with me to this day. Although Private Rites is a very different story, it had a very similar effect on me.

In a near future where climate change has lead to near-constant rain and most cities being flooded, 3 sisters have a complicated relationship both with each other and their father. After he passes away they’re forced to deal with their past and to confront difficult truths.

The setting, with the constant clouds and rain, flooded cities and the impact this has on travel and infrastructure gave a menacing atmosphere. The fact that this is something we could see happen made it all the more disturbing.

The troubled relationships between the sisters and their father would have made for an interesting story without the other elements, but adding them all together results in a delightfully disturbing story that will haunt me for some time.

When I wasn’t reading this book I was thinking about it, and it was the first book in a while that I was prioritising reading over pretty much everything else.

A haunting look at familial relationships and climate change, if you enjoyed the gentle horror and beautiful writing of the authors previous books then you will love this one too. And if you haven’t picked them up before I highly recommend you give this one a try.

I will read any word this author will toss my way - I adored 'Our Wives Under the Sea' and her collection of short stories 'Salt Slow', so when this novel was announced I had high hopes. I was not disappointed in the least. Yet again displaying gorgeous prose and easy flow of pace, Armfield drags us into an unsettled world in the not too distant future where the climate crisis really has reached a true crisis point. Past the point of no return, the world is flooding and the characters in this tale are living in a drowning city.

Armfield examines the three sisters lives in relation to one another and their now dead father. Against backdrop of constant rain and creeping tide lines, it feels ominous, uneasy, a feeling that something is coming, hurtling towards us as we pick apart their lives.

A masterclass in writing, packing so much history, baggage, trauma and atmosphere in such a compact book.

Private Rites has been pitched as a queer King Lear at the end of the world and that rings true in this bleak, blistering and brilliant book. It combines an intimate unravelling of grief and relationships from fractured characters with a ecological disaster looming on the horizon.

As expected from anything drawing on King Lear, this is a book deeply focused on the family and dysfunctional, tangled relationships within it. Isla, Irene and Agnes are the three central sisters, each with their own nuances and complexities. There is also a shadow of grief upon them - the recent death of their father unravels a web of lies and secrets long buried. Tangible among them is the resounding impact of Isla and Irene’s mother many years ago. Their trauma from this lies unresolved and rears itself again in unexpected ways for each of them. This book really grapples with the question of inheritance: inherited trauma, secrets and the concept of a legacy. In particular, that last theme comes into sharper focus against an impending ecological disaster where the futility of it all is laid bare. There is no legacy to have in a world wracked by horror.
I really enjoyed the way grief distorted aspects of themselves differently as they grappled with their individual problems and relationships. They are messy people but feel all the more human for it. The queer representation is also wonderful to see and there is a spectrum of experiences depicted here too. Armfield is very much concerned with the ripplings of time and emotions, shown in a narrative that does not always stay with the linear. It is unsettling in its uncanny playfulness with time. From the very first page, you are pushed off kilter and never fully return. There is such a strong sense of dread and foreboding that you cannot shake - it clings to you in a dreary fog. All the while, the storm rages outside.

Armfield’s writing has this intangible quality that sticks to you like glue. It is mercurial and mysterious, constantly shifting beneath your fingers. I find her writing irresistibly beautiful but with a distinct sense of uneasiness that lingers. It is crafted impeccably with exquisite and interesting word choices and overall this lyrical quality that adds a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere to the narratives. There is something magical about it but in the sense of the old magic, the one with bite and blood attached to it. The darkness of humanity and the impossibility of stopping the oncoming storm are imbued into every page. It adds this sense of hopelessness, an awareness that we’re doomed to repeat the same narrative over and over again. The prose is just delectable with such a fragile heart to it that sinks into oblivion cast against the horror you can see coming. Here it is also porous, seeping through into your skin and affecting your perspective. Armfield cleverly disengages you from the narrative you may know and replaces it with something entirely different. It still feels very much like a Shakespearean tragedy with the monumental scale and reprecussions, but also stays focused on these flawed characters as they take centre stage.

There is a creeping sense of dread that informs every page and sinks into your skin. The horror in this book is in the mundanity of life continuing against a horrific ecological crisis - beautifully illustrated by the excerpts of the point of view of The City. Here we get a bird’s eye view of impending doom contrasted by the pops of light and life of people. It makes for an unbearable tragedy and yet we can do nothing to stop what we know is coming. Armfield is poignant in this messaging, made all the more realistic by contemporary attitudes to climate change and other political movements. There is a sense of apathy that drains characters and makes them powerless chess pieces in a grander game that they cannot envision. Other angles of this come into play in the final sequence in a way that simultaneously answers many questions I had throughout reading and raises many more. This is not a book that will easily crack open and release its secrets, it is one where you will have to wade in yourself to piece it all together.

Private Rites is hands down one of my favourite reads of the year so far.