Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

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When Leah and her colleagues mysteriously disappear for months in a deep sea submarine exploration gone wrong, her wife Miri is left to assume the worst.

Nonetheless, Leah returns from the deep, and Leah comes home. 

But Leah is not the same. 

What a haunting premise for Julia Armfield's latest debut. This is a short novel; one that was equal parts literary fiction, psychological horror, and a deeply-poetic commentary on the mystery of grief. Told in alternating chapters between Miri and Leah, this poignant story unfolds slowly but more beautifully than I could have ever anticipated. 

Miri's chapters are an uninhibited free fall into her psyche--more a masterfully-penned character study than anything else. Her reflective inner dialogues are complex, almost uncomfortably human, and occasionally drift back through the history of her relationship with Leah. Leah's chapters, on the other hand, are where the plot comes to life, and where the truth of her doomed voyage under the sea is revealed. 

If you're looking for a plot-propelled story, this may not be for you. But, trust me when I say that this is worth reading for even the writing alone. Here, Armfield pens a deeply-unsettling but equally-gorgeous story of love, the temporality of life, and the beckoning mysteries of the deep all woven into one. 

As Miri comes to terms with her new reality of a wife she hardly recognizes, and Leah grapples with an inexplicable pull back to the depths despite finally being back on land, the story starts to take on the form of a modern folktale. There are flickers of the fantastical strewn throughout these otherwise austere chapters, and that's really what made this such a masterpiece for me. By the very end, you'll have found that you've slipped into a story where it's abundantly clear that there is so very much--of life, of ourselves, of the sea--we will never know, and so few answers we ever had to begin with.

Rating: 5 Stars
Publication Details: Out 7/12/2022, Picador 

Huge thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for providing my review copy!

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