Thank you to NetGalley and 4th Estate for the ARC. This is another offering by Julia Armfield that gradually gets under your skin and haunts you long after you’ve finished reading the book. The story of three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, their relationships with each other, with their emotionally abusive father, the mother who disappeared from their lives when they were very young, the house they grew up in and the numerous strangers who seem to be always watching. Armfield’s writing is often beautiful and always full of spot-on turns of phrase and observations. This is a novel born of the climate crisis and the rain, the unrelenting, claustrophobic, never-ending greyness of it is as much a character of the book as any of the main protagonists. If I have a criticism it is that the depiction of the constantly squabbling sisters got a little wearisome, especially towards the middle of the book when it began to seem as if that was all the book was going to be about - but then we got to the denouement of the book, when all the hints and twists came together in one absolutely bonkers ending. Just fabulous.

I finished this late last night (or early this morning) and then lay in the dark for a full hour still thinking about it. I had a similar feeling after Our Wives Under the Sea but this was darker, deeper, harder to shake.

Unsettling, elegant, brutal writing. I highlighted so many lines of prose, it became farcical. Just so many identifiable and relatable moments, thoughts and realisations. Excellent on family dynamics and marriage, the mundanity of the apocalypse made this the more frightening because it just all feels entirely inevitable. A slow, wet slide into nothing.

Basically, I will read anything Julia Armfield writes.

If you enjoyed the sogginess and lesbianism of Our Wives Under the Sea, you’re in for a treat because Private Rites is queerer and damper than ever.

I love Armfield’s writing and really enjoyed this, each sentence is really rich and poetic, and I found myself reading slower to try to soak it all in.

Most of the story reads like lit-fic, exploring three sisters who have recently lost their father, with whom they had a troubled relationship. We see their relationships with each other, and their significant others, the fallout of their difficult upbringing, all backdropped by the ever-rising water slowly drowning the city.

Underneath, there is a subtle undercurrent that something darker is going on, and this doesn’t come fully into focus until the very end.

I was fascinated by the characters, their stories, motivations, and relationships with each other. This is a thoroughly queer story and this, like with OWUtS, feels so refreshing and powerful to me in the realness and complexity of its depiction.

Different parts reminded me of Ling Ma’s Severance in terms of continuing with the mundanity of life as the world ends, as well as Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite with the flooding basements set apart from a wealthy family’s modernist house that nevertheless feels somehow haunted.

I think if you’re seeking a true horror story, this may be a bit disappointing, but I definitely felt harrowed throughout by the ways we can be cruel to those we love, the impending end of the world we feel helpless to do anything about, and by the additional promise of something worse still to come.

This is a climate dystopia book in which society is sliding slowly into the abyss - bleak in its realism in the way the world accepts, compartmentalises and copes with Ultimate Bad Weather, with the places they can go gradually shrinking in on them - forcing people into higher and higher buildings and cutting off access points to different parts of the world, then the city itself. While I was reading it I was so aware that the claustrophobia and continous, inevitable decay feels quite reminiscent of the current state of the UK - the creeping mold, the housing crisis, inept government and transport issues are all too familiar and it doesn't feel a world away from our own. Fun!

In the middle of this narrative are three sisters who are dealing with the looming absence of their newly dead, emotionally abusive father and trying to figure out how the relationships between each other and the people they love are shaped by both him and the world they've grown up in. I enjoyed how frankly dislikable these women often were (at lease Isla and Irene) and how the switching POV allowed us to see both how they percieve themselves and how each other. They also each have jobs, romantic lives that carry on going and have to adapt in the wake of the disasters around them.

Armfield's writing is gorgeous and insightful, I enjoyed the narrative tangents within the POVs and also within the 'City' POVs. This is a more ambitious book in terms of world building and character than Our Wives and in some ways feels like a less cohesive story overall but it's a great addition to the Armfield oeuvre and I can't wait to see what she does with water next!

Julia Armfield’s “lesbian Lear” takes three queer sisters and places them in the middle of - what she’s called - a “mundane apocalypse.” The sisters inhabit a drowned world, a place of unceasing rain which is slowly but inexorably wearing away its very foundations. Coastal regions have long ago disappeared, as have things like cars and plane travel, most people live in cities since these are the only areas that retain some semblance of what was formally normality. Government’s largely absent and when it does intervene incompetent. The wealthy inhabit custom-made houses in the higher-most regions while ordinary people are mainly confined to the upper reaches of crumbling high-rises. It’s a similar scenario to the ones that writers like Ballard found fascinating but, unlike Ballard’s work, there are few crescendos here, no violent rupture in the fabric of society. Instead, everything’s dying off by degrees: some people have joined end-of-the-world cults with their arcane rituals; a few gather together to stage futile protests; others simply choose to vanish. But the mass of the population lives in a kind of stupefied denial, too fearful to look directly into the face of disaster. They cling to old routines, commuting to work, moaning about their bosses or colleagues or flatmates. They come together with one another but just as often drift apart.

Armfield’s vivid descriptions of rain seeping into every corner of daily life owes a partial debt to Arthur Machen, a favourite writer of Armfield’s, particularly the emphasis on its impact on mental as much as physical space. Amidst this simmering discontent, siblings Isla, Irene and half-sister Agnes are intent on maintaining a careful distance from one another. Although Isla and Irene are united in their contempt for younger, half-sister Agnes. Agnes meanwhile takes pleasure in small acts of subversion from mislabelling coffee cups in the café where she works to fucking random women in changing rooms. But the siblings’ awkward stalemate’s disrupted by their father’s death, a once-revered architect and an exacting, sadistic parent. His death brings the sisters back to the house he built for them, stirring up long-buried emotions and unsettling childhood memories, conjuring an atmosphere of growing, Jacksonian unease. Then weird things start to happen all of which appear to be converging on Agnes.

Armfield’s prose is impressively sinuous, her imagery striking, and her vision of a blighted future created by climate change all too convincing. But as a novel I found this unbalanced, difficult to place. On one level it’s an unusual blend of folk horror and speculative fiction but the bulk of the actual narrative’s caught up in detailing the fractured interactions between the three sisters and the aftermath of early trauma – which wasn’t always that appealing to me. There are some pleasing folkloric and mythic elements woven into Armfield’s story but they’re oddly underdeveloped, and I thought the final reveal was too heavily signposted – perhaps because I’m overly familiar with the classic horror movies Armfield loves and directly/indirectly references throughout. But perhaps that’s the point? That standard horror scenarios are less than scary when compared to the sheer scale of the environmental blight that lies ahead. Armfield’s story hints at alternative ways of tackling this looming disaster but her ultimate message seems less about concrete solutions than it is emotional responses: the importance of empathy, of making and sustaining meaningful connections.

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.