Leah, a marine biologist, is finally back from a submarine expedition that went awry leaving the crew at the very bottom of the sea at unfathomable depth for months -- way longer than planned. Suddenly relieved, her wife Miri cannot but notice that Leah is strange and distant. And then strange things begin to happen.
Our Wives Under The Sea is the remarkable debut novel by author Julia Armfield, and is a mesmerizing, haunting, atmospheric and uncanny piece of new weird writing that calls to mind Jeff Vandermeer’s Trilogy and HP Lovecraft in several ways. It is told in mesmerizing the language and alternating voices that unveil what happened during Leah’s misadventure along with the two women’s backstory – their upbringing, religion, Leah’s fascination with the sea, their love story.
The trope of the character who comes back wrong is not new, yet Armfield’s writing goes further as it provides is a nuanced exploration of longing, guilt, haunting, being haunted and the uncanny (if you are familiar with the theories of the uncanny you’ll have a ball). The sea is the ideal locus for what is repressed, for Lovecraftian chthonic horror and the uncanny -- and here this takes different forms: the book touches on legend, religion and mysticism, the sense of awe that goes with it as well as the horror and abjection – and it cannot but end in indeterminacy, as there can be no way of fully grasping what is going on. A story of modern angst, beautiful and disorienting.

I am grateful to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Beautiful but terrifying! An amazingly haunting exploration of grief. Love a good gay story with a thrilling mystery.

Lyrical, mysterious and tender. 3.5 rating, raised

This was a somewhat curious read. It is a tender story of love, change and loss, between two women, but with somewhat unexplained strangeness. It is told from the perspective of both women. Miri recounts the present story. Leah, who may not quite be Leah any more in Miri’s ‘in the present’ account, tells the story of events which happened many months ago, at the time they are happening. Though its possible that Leah who may no longer quite be Leah is remembering all these events

Leah is a marine biologist. She takes part in a research project, with two others, descending to the sea floor, there to stay for some time. Something goes terribly wrong, and the deep sea observation submarine loses power, loses connection with its base on land.

And that land base is pretty odd too ‘The Centre’ – it’s never quite explained, but the ‘experiment’ which Leah and her fellows engage with may not be at all the observation of the creatures of the sea floor they think they are engaged in. There’s a possible whiff of the Portland Down, Governmental Secrecy about all of it.

Leah and her fellows are missing for many months, and The Centre is also mysteriously hard to contact

When Leah eventually returns, she is quite odd, and gets progressively stranger.

This trembles of the edges of being some kind of supernatural, conspiracy, horror, which is never fully spelt out.

This is both a strength and a weakness, as, in a sense, the same kind of slow seeping strangeness carries on

It is a short novel, but, even so, I felt the dynamic dragged a little, and this could have been still shorter.

The challenge was that I found my attention beginning to wane, realising that most likely, ‘explanation’ would not be forthcoming, so what was left – the trajectory of the story and its apt ending being obvious, was atmosphere.

Our Wives Under the Sea
‘I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through a different set of eyes.’
A queer love story, a modern gothic horror, a fairy tale; however we want to label it – Julia Armfield’s debut novel is an exquisitely penned tale of falling in love, of loss and grief. Her unerring prose will submerge you in her world; from the bottom of the inky, dark ocean bed, to the mind of a woman whose world has been dismantled to the point of obscurity.
Miri & Leah, happily married, a couple who are used to periods of separation because of Leah’s job as a deep-sea research scientist. Happy, until Leah goes missing during one of her missions and is away for 6 months. When she returns, she is changed and their relationship changes with it.
Told in alternating voices; what I think are diary entries from Leah, during her time at the bottom of the ocean and then Miri, a more intimate account of events, her relationship with her wife, her dead mother and the friends around them.
The diary entries are sparse and foreboding; they are laden with the claustrophobic weight of the water, the darkness that surrounds the broken vessel that Leah finds herself in is ominous and terrifying. Over the days and months, stranded, helpless and without knowledge of anything beyond that metal container, Armfield manages to portray the resultant madness, the disintegration of self with haunting clarity.
‘In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve’
What plays out in Miri’s pages is more poignant, a closely observed account of love and loss, what we cling to when something slips through our fingers, when someone close dies or just disappears, how we cope when we need to move forward, even by the tiniest of degrees.
This book’s climax is beautiful in its tenderness, heartfelt as it is tragic, a physical manifestation of the core of this allegorical tale. Pure brilliance, I adored it!

3.5***

Not too sure I understood that and what was going on. I still want some answers.

This book was lyrical and haunting. It explored relationships, grief and the sea. Despite finding this absolutely bizarre and not achieving answers I still want, the writing spurred me on.

I think this is less of an answer book and more of an exploration of emotion and letting go. We follow Miri and Leah and their relationship before and after Leah emerges from an underwater job. Miri who is left behind while Leah went on an underwater mission. We see Miri recount the start of their relationship, before Leah submerges, the months Leah was “missing” and her reappearance. We also witness Miri trying to deal with the weird and radical changes to Leah- Leah is changed after coming up from the water and Miri is at her wits end trying to figure out what happened to “her Leah”.

While I wanted answers definitely (what is this centre!? What did Leah write/observe? What did Leah become? What is Miri’s future?) this was definitely more a story of grief over someone “lost” to us, the breakdown of a relationship and ultimately letting go of the person you loved.

While the writing was lyrical and I enjoyed witnessing the relationship of Miri and Leah, the bit that really drew my attention was Leah under the sea and the descriptions of this- absolutely stunning.

This was a very odd and weird book, and while I prefer books with set answers, this was very impactful and has left me contemplating about the book after.

Thank you NetGalley for this Arc.

With thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

This is an intriguing, surreal novel. Miri's marine biologist wife Leah returns long after all hope was lost for the deep-sea submarine mission she was on. Miri has already started to go through the grief process for her lost wife, compounded by the dangling uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to the submarine she was on. When Leah returns it is soon obvious she has changed - reluctant to speak or go out, with changes to her skin, unexplained nosebleeds, and a propensity to spend ever longer hours in the bath which she leaves ringed with slime when she emerges.

As she adapts to life with this changed Leah, Miri's universe becomes ever more narrow and detached from outside realities. She interacts with the outside world, but her narrative is almost completely an internal one as the reality at home becomes stranger and stranger, and she feels unable to share what is happening with her friends. Chapters alternate between Miri and Leah's narrative voices, but Leah's account only deals with the preparations for her mission and the experience on the submarine when power fails. We get nothing about the circumstances of her return, or the causes of the changes in her that go far beyond those expected after a return to the surface from the deep.

I wasn't expecting a horror story, but it slowly dawned on me as I read that this is precisely what we have here. The best kind of horror, not one of nightmare-inducing shocks but rather presenting a build-up of small differences which subtly displace our sense of the world until it becomes unthinkable, and where no attempt at an explanation is provided. This is a small, perfectly formed gem of a novel.

This book honestly made my head spin, it was so good. A split narrative between Miri, sharing what happens after Leah returns home from a submarine voyage that goes terribly wrong, and Leah, her wife, narrating what happens when she and 2 crewmates are stranded in the deepest part of the ocean for three months.

There is a claustrophobic element to both parts of the story, from Leah being physically trapped on tiny vessel, with the immense pressure of the ocean all around her, to Miri trapped by her own need to stay close to her ailing wife, and equally trapped in her feelings of loss, grief, and confusion.

This isn't a book that provides huge amounts of answers. Like the ocean itself unsettling, changeable, overwhelming, and there are always more mysteries than answers - and none of that makes it any less beautiful or awe-inspiring.

There are multiple ways you could interpret the cause of Leah's condition, the cause of the submarine accident, and the structural elements of the plot, and yet as much as it might have been satisfying to have those answers from the author, being left without those answers draws us closer to Miri, especially, as she seeks answers and wonders what the hell happened, if the woman who came back from the deep is even really her wife or something very different.

Wow, this was trippy! I'm still slightly discombobulated since surfacing from the novel and I'm not entirely sure whether that's a good thing.

I adored the premise; I love sapphic novels, I'm fascinated by the deep sea and this sounded like nothing I had ever read before. Armfield writes like a dream, escpecially her descriptions. The claustrophobia and confusion was completely palpable and I felt myself go slightly mad alongside the characters.

For me, Miri's narrative just wasn't nearly as interesting as Leah's. I found myself sighing in relief when they ended and the 'real story' could start up again. I wish the novel had been slightly more clear-cut in terms of the tone it was hoping to evoke - I took everything very literally initially (I wondered whether Leah's physiological symptoms are true to life complications of exposure to such high pressure) but then the story became more psychological and - perhaps even - teetered on horror. I just wish Armfield had committed either way!

Nevertheless, a really interesting book - just not sure it's one I'd revisit in a hurry.

The characters in this book were beautifully set up and the pacing was on point alongside this. The writing was immersive and I found myself getting lost in this horror fairytale.

This was just as eery and creepy as I hoped. Very well written, I fles through this one, kept me on the edge of my seat. If you love weird, creepy, atmospheric stories this one is for you.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I've never read anything quite like this book. At less than 200 pages, it's a slim volume but Armfield makes every word count. I just want to go back to the beginning and start again to pick up on every little detail and turn of phrase. It's an absolutely stunning, genre-bending piece of writing and should be nominated for every award going this year.

This is the only story I have read from Armfield, but she is now an auto-buy author for me! I couldn't put this book down. I have annotated and tabbed the heck out of it. Every page was so beautiful and eerie. Also, Florence Welch loved this book and that is honestly the biggest flex for a debut novel.

This is a dual perspective between married couple Miri and Leah. Leah just came back from a submarine quest gone wrong and is just a shell of who she was before the trip. Miri is elated to have Leah back but slowly starts to mourn the relationship they once had.

We get flashbacks to their relationship "before" as well as Leah's expedition under the sea. Both were so heart-wrenching and I could feel Miri's pain and Leah's terror.

Miri is witnessing a physical change in Leah and will soon have to confront it. (cw: body horror)

The writing is melancholic and the sections are short, making this easy for a lump to form in your throat and easier to fly through the pages. This is honestly a perfect novel to go into blind, so just pick it up! You won't regret it.

I was drawn into the cover of this book and I had little idea of what lay on its pages. It ended up being very unique and strange, so I’m glad that I had no expectations going into it.

Miri’s wife Leah has finally arrived home after a deep sea mission that went wrong. However, Leah appears to have brought back part of the sea with her and she isn’t the same woman who boarded that submarine. Miri can feel her wife slipping away from her and she must come to some kind of acceptance that their life will never be the same.

Of course, there is plenty of commentary on female relationships and in particularly, lesbian relationships. It’s delivered with humour, honesty and thoughtful observations, which made me fully believe in Miri and Leah’s marriage and them as real people.

Armfield is a wonderful writer and there were several points in the book that caused me to reflect on my own view of the world. The entire book is a metaphor for relationship breakdown and mental illness and it’s done is such a clever, powerful manner. I’d never confronted these topics through this medium before and I really appreciated the fresh take on themes that have been done a million times over.

Leah’s chapters reiterated how terrifying the ocean is. I’ve always been simultaneously in awe and a little afraid of the sea and Leah’s reminder that there are so many mysteries in its deepest, darkest depths is so scary to me. These secrets pose a chilling threat that seeps through the book’s pages and drives it towards its strange, ethereal end.

Our Wives Under The Sea is a unique, refreshing look at literary themes that we’ve all definitely read about before but perhaps not quite like this. It’s immersive, imaginative and delivers a heartbreaking ending that is still somehow tinged with hope. A feminist allegory that sings mournfully about true love and the pain of letting it go.

In a way, this book is a ghost story. It's the haunting of things left behind, lives lived, words unspoken and it plays brilliantly into the very human fear that you can't ever know someone and what goes on inside their head, not truly—even the people you love the most.

It follows two PoVs: a biologist Leah who embarks on a submarine research trip that's only meant to be 3 weeks and ends up being trapped down there for 6 months, and her wife Miri who's back at home going out of her mind trying to sort through the wreckage that is her life now, especially once Leah returns and she comes to the realisation that shes came back 'wrong'.

It's a hard book to categorise. It has the creeping dread and fear of the unknown of cosmic horror, the pure wrongness & absurdity of weird fiction, yet the intimate (at times almost voyeuristic) look at characters that comes with literary fiction these days.
It reminded me of reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor last year. Two very different books but both have the same 'surrounded by people yet achingly lonely' vibe to me.

It might be a boring read to some, if you need a book with a lot of plot then it's maybe not for you but you guys know I love character writing and wow did it meet my expectations!
We've got lesbians written for lesbians by a lesbian and boy does that come across—and I mean that as a huge compliment from a queer woman myself!

Miri especially is so human. I like reading about women who aren't perfect and don't fit into neat little boxes. Miri is selfish and grief makes her even more so but I like how Armfield writes it in a way that says maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing. Grief after all is an inherently selfish thing.

It may only be March but it's already in the running for 2022 favourite.
Thanks to @netgalley & @picadorbooks for the arc in exchange for an honest review.
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This is an intriguing, surreal novel. Miri's marine biologist wife Leah returns long after all hope was lost for the deep-sea submarine mission she was on. Miri has already started to go through the grief process for her lost wife, compounded by the dangling uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to the submarine she was on. When Leah returns it is soon obvious she has changed - reluctant to speak or go out, with changes to her skin, unexplained nosebleeds, and a propensity to spend ever longer hours in the bath which she leaves ringed with slime when she emerges.

As she adapts to life with this changed Leah, Miri's universe becomes ever more narrow and detached from outside realities. She interacts with the outside world, but her narrative is almost completely an internal one as the reality at home becomes stranger and stranger, and she feels unable to share what is happening with her friends. Chapters alternate between Miri and Leah's narrative voices, but Leah's account only deals with the preparations for her mission and the experience on the submarine when power fails. We get nothing about the circumstances of her return, or the causes of the changes in her that go far beyond those expected after a return to the surface from the deep.

I wasn't expecting a horror story, but it slowly dawned on me as I read that this is precisely what we have here. The best kind of horror, not one of nightmare-inducing shocks but rather presenting a build-up of small differences which subtly displace our sense of the world until it becomes unthinkable, and where no attempt at an explanation is provided. This is a small, perfectly formed gem of a novel.

Words can’t really express how much I loved this book, and by now many others will have done much better to describe the wet weirdness of it, so I’ll keep my effusive praise concise. Armfield’s first novel, following her equally impressive short story collection Salt Slow, alternates between the first person narratives of Leah - writing what she knows of what happened to her on an extended submarine trip - and Miri - coming to terms with how different her wife is on her return from the sea. Our Wives Under the Sea is poetic, beautiful, and terrifying. It’s a gush of cold water to bring you out of a horrible dream and into an even more horrible reality.

Narrated in alternating chapters voiced in the first person, Our Wives Under the Sea is the story of Miri and her wife, Leah, who has recently returned catastrophically delayed from a dangerous deep-sea research mission. A trip that was supposed to have been a routine three weeks turned into six months, and the Leah who has come back is, Miri knows, somehow not quite right. Barely communicative, she spends long hours in the bath, stirs spoonfuls of salt into glasses of tap water, and is prone to violent outbursts of screaming in the night. What begins as the chronicle of a return tinged with resentment – Miri spent most of Leah’s absence believing her to be dead – soon descends the slippery slope into surrealist horror, at the same time offering a shattering exploration of grief, marriage, loneliness, and how much of ourselves we are willing to sacrifice for the people we love.

[ . . . ]

Our Wives Under the Sea is a novel of extremes: intimate and inward-looking, focused on people locked together in small spaces, it also manages to be sweeping in its outlook, taking in themes as vast and ever-changing as the ocean itself. The balance between these two perspectives is finely honed, the blend of horror, realism and emotion mixed in just the right proportions. If it all sounds like a lot for a novel of 240 pages, it is – but, refreshingly, Armfield is the kind of writer who doesn’t let theme get in the way of story. Our Wives Under the Sea is a work of serious heart, with strongly drawn characters, compulsive pacing and an ending that is inevitable yet exquisite in its simplicity. More meditative than salt slow – which was at times a white-knuckle ride of imagination – Armfield’s move into longer fiction is confirmation of a dazzling talent and true ability to get under the skin of things, a novel that is about so much and still just about two people: deep and mesmerising and hauntingly beautiful.

Thanks to the publisher for granting access. What an incredibly immersive story. Hauntingly sad, yet beautiful. One of my favourite reads of the year so far.

Oh My God. This book is stunning. STUNNING. It made me feel all sorts of things, and nearly 24 hours after finishing it I have a book hangover of epic proportions. It’s unusual, and a bit strange and one of those reads which just unsettles you in the best possibly way.

Written from the perspective of Miri and Leah in alternating chapters Our Wives Under The Sea is primarily about their marriage and what happens when one of them goes on a deep-sea mission. Leah, a marine biologist, has been obsessed with the sea and its creatures since she was a young girl and has found a job as a marine biologist where she gets to indulge her passion.

She works for ‘The Centre’, an elusive and secretive organisation which examines sea life, and is sent on a three week mission with two colleagues, both of which she has worked with before. She’s been on missions before, and this one seems very run of the mill, but the three weeks stretch to four. Then another weeks passes, and another and before long it’s been a few months, and Miri is receiving occasional calls from The Centre with not very reassuring, ‘everything is totally FINE! REALLY’ messages. When Leah eventually returns, she is changed, she seems muted and sombre and Miri notices that her skin is very weird in places. The easy rhythms their relationship seem to have disappeared and they are unmoored from one another. Leah is also spending a lot of time in the bath, locked away behind the bathroom door and Miri is on the outside feeling like she is losing the woman she loves. Her own work starts to suffer as her worry for Leah intensifies.

This is an oppressive and claustrophobic book, centering as it does around mainly the two women, Leah’s trip deep beneath the sea and it aftermath. They live in a flat together, and their upstairs neighbour blares their TV day and night. The description of this, which seems to intensify as the atmosphere in their flat thickens, combined with the descriptions of Leah’s vessel being surrounded by blackness of the sea felt almost like a weight on my chest.

In fact, I felt quite jangly by the end and – I’m not sure panicky is quite the right work – but kind of like that. It has been an age since a book has evoked this sort of reaction in me. I felt totally consumed by this book and utterly absorbed by what I was reading. The writing is just so fantastic and utterly immersive that I felt like I was in their flat and I felt like I was on a vessel deep on the sea bed with only torchlight for company.

Our Wives Under the Sea is an extraordinary book of immense power. It is unusual, evocative and one of the most startling pieces of writing I have read in a while, I suspect it will stay with me for a very long time.

‘The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.’

My thanks to Pan Macmillan Picador for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ by Julia Armfield in exchange for an honest review.

This is Julia Armfield’s debut novel and is a beautifully written work of literary horror. As the title indicates, its focus is upon the sea and the narrative slowly reveals the secrets of its depths both in scientific terms as well as through the lore of the sea.

Marine biologist Leah was part of a small team undertaking a deep sea mission that was expected to last three weeks. Then something catastrophic occurred and their vessel was stranded on the ocean floor. When Leah returns after six months it is not clear how they survived. Over time her wife, Miri, begins to feel that Leah may have come back wrong.

The narrative is itself quite fluid; moving between the present as Miri observes Leah slipping away from her as well as her memories of the months of uncertainty and of their earlier life, including the small things that had united them. There are also chapters from Leah’s perspective while onboard the submersible craft during the mission.

The chapters by Leah have a dream/nightmare quality about them as the crew seeks to understand their predicament and are haunted by unusual events while stranded in the depths. It brought to mind Michael Crichton’s ‘The Sphere’ and the film ‘The Abyss’.

It’s not all moody reflection as there are some lighter moments such as Miri’s interactions with members of an online message board dedicated to ‘wives of imaginary spacemen’ or her memories of watching films such as ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Fly’ with Leah.

I am very drawn to nautical fiction as well as to horror, so this proved a strong combination. I also found Miri’s emotions very raw as she struggles with the initial loss and later with Leah’s condition following her return.

I found ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ an unusual novel that evoked the primordial unease associated with the ocean depths. I felt that Julia Armfield’s writing was lyrical and haunting.

On a side note the cover artwork was excellent and again created a sense of unease with the watery blurring of the woman’s features.