This was an interesting read. The ending gave you a taster of explanation, allowing you to continue to imagine and speculate.

a story of three estranged sisters, Irene, Isla, and Agnes united over the death of their father. Agnes appears as the forgotten appendage and exists as a constant reminder of the life that Isla and Irene continued to live after their parent's divorce and the death of their mother. 10 months after the initial familial rupture of divorce, came Agnes, 11 years younger and their half-sister. the morning after seeing their father’s body, Isla and Irene return to his house and recount moments of their childhood and remembering their mother. Irene recalls the way her father showed no consistency in his love for their mother, and when he ceased to love her for the last time, their mother unravelled and died. their father carried himself with both ‘great ease and easy cruelty’ and made it his mission to create rifts between his daughters. even from beyond the grave he manages to do exactly that as his daughters deal with his estate. the plot is set in a city that is partially submerged where people cannot even be buried due to the fear of them floating to the surface. the city is affected by frequent power cuts as the infrastructure caves in. chapters are littered throughout the book from the perspective of the City poetically shedding light on the inevitable nature of climate crises and global decay. we learn the sisters had all omitted much of their childhood from their fellow sisters, such as their mother’s erratic behaviour, moments of nighttime communion and the condition of their mother’s death or absence. i absolutely loved Our Wives Under the Sea and this did not disappoint me in the slightest. the narrative is beautifully fragmented, fluttering between the three sisters, the declining city and then their partners; we see the leading moments come at the end in a crescendo. as soon as i had a grasp of what was going on i was waiting for it all to come to a head and it totally met my expectations. the ending however, is left somewhat floating in mid space and incomplete, but the image of it? perfection

posted on goodreads and instagram. thankyou so much for this ARC - this definitely already lines up as one of my best reads of 2024 so far!

Three sisters get together following the death of their father. That’s about as much as I’ll say about the plot… Rain, rain and rain. The world is being drowned by the never ending rain that provides the perfect dark and chilly undertone to the story. I could’ve read a whole novel just about the city being slowly drowned.

The novel is told through multiple view points. The sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, a couple other characters you’ll get to meet, as well as the City. If you’ve read Our Wives Under the Sea or Saltslow, you’ll be aware of Julia Armstrong’s tone and narrative style. There’s an unsettling and melancholic quality to her words that I find quite hard to describe but absolutely love and find it almost hypnotic.

This one does have more plot than Our Wives though, with the same style of narrative. I absolutely loved the ending of this and how the story developed. I can definitely see how it might not be for everyone but it was definitely for me

Armfield is such an artful poet of wateriness. Set amidst a visceral imagining of climate catastrophe, this depicts with uncanny foresight what it might be like to live in a city like London when the waters rise: there are ramshackle jetties and water taxis trying to compensate for the fact that the outer edges of train lines are under water; outages of power are commonplace; alarms and sirens go off but no-one knows what they signify or what to do; and seals, pelicans and eels are moving into homes.

In the foreground are the archetypal three sisters - Isla, Irene and Agnes - all struggling in their own ways. The text references King Lear and Macbeth for necessary allusions to conflict and inheritance, a wayward and troubling father, absent mothers, from the former; and something more uncanny, weird and superstitious from the latter. For one of the outcomes of this end of days scenario is the rise of neo-religions and cults.

In some ways I found this narrative less definitive than [book:Our Wives Under the Sea|58659343]: the momentum is more blurred, less directional, more... watery and undefined. The denouement is, perhaps, a bit more dramatic with slightly less of a logical build-up. But those are small niggles.

What this succeeds in doing brilliantly is to delineate the nuanced relationships between the three sisters, the ways they simultaneously resent and cling to each other, the impact of parental troubles that shadow their growth and haunt their present. The febrile nature of their connections, and those they share with their wives and partners, is as brittle, enthreatened and undefined as the water in which this book is seeped. Their passivity, their hovering between safety, endurance and defiance is reflected more widely: Isla and Irene's cocooning is contrasted with Isla's ex-wife's determination to seek a better way to live - or, at least, see what's left of the world before it drowns. At the same time, the snarky, resentful, embittered yet, ultimately, strong sisterly bond feels tangible.

Atmospheric and controlled, this is a horrifying book delivered with a light touch. There have been other novelistic depictions of where our continued evasions of climate policies could lead but this feels like one of the best imagined to me precisely because it's not overly dramatic: the slow slide into disaster feels oddly realistic as is the idea of a population essentially abandoned by a government: it's the small touches that make this work - chicory coffee (presumably because the beans can't be grown or imported), the way life continues with people getting to work as far as they can (with only an off-stage mention of an anti-work protest), houses that either collapse or those, for the wealthy, that can lift themselves above the saturated earth.

The interdependencies between the personal story of the sisters and the wider one of climate catastrophe play off each other in a lovely mutuality. It's a bit of a wrench - and a relief! - to look up from this book and realise that it's not raining, that the water isn't rising in the basement... and that it's sunny outside my window!

Immersive, thoughtful and lyrical.