Miri has been waiting for her wife Leah to return from her subaquatic mission that has gone on much to long. When she does come back, she is different, changed by her time beneath the sea. This haunting book is many things: a meditation on loss and letting go; a love story, all in an almost gothic frame that touches on realism then moves adjacent to it. Memorable, sad and orIginal.

I don't know how to formulate the words for this - I might come back and write more when I've had time to think. Our Wives Under the Sea is beautifully written - the prose is gorgeous, and the tone changes between points of view are clear and match the characters perfectly. Miri and Leah are both wonderfully fleshed out - they continuously felt real, even as the events depicted became less so. I was utterly engrossed by this, and read the whole thing in under 24 hours - I've seen other reviews say to try and immerse yourself totally, and read this in one session, and I think that's sound advice.
This was a beautiful and haunting book - I'll be thinking about it for a long time, and can see a re-read happening soon.

I really thought I would love this book; it simply didn't occur to me that I wouldn't. Julia Armfield's debut, Salt Slow, is one of my favourite short story collections ever; the inimitable SARAH WATERS blurbed this novel; every author who I've seen talk about this novel online has given it nothing less than a stellar review--all signs pointed to my loving this. And yet, quite frankly, I just didn't.

Our Wives Under the Sea was, for me, the kind of novel that you forget about the second you finish it--honestly, the kind of novel you forget about as you're reading it. The biggest issue with this book is that its story doesn't have any meat, nothing to really sink your teeth into. You're given descriptions and vague impressions and feelings and moments and snippets of memory, but none of this ever feels like it's attached to anything solid, to any kind of substantial foundation. The result is that the novel feels like a collection of disparate parts rather than a cohesive whole, a bunch of jumbled elements that never really coalesce into anything that feels like a proper narrative. (Luce's review sums up my feelings perfectly.)

More than making the story forgettable, this lack of substance also makes Our Wives Under the Sea so hard to get through. This is a very short novel, and yet it felt like such a drag to read. There's no sense of momentum, here, nothing to make you want to keep reading. The novel is split into two timelines, and rather than becoming more complex or interesting as you go on, they just end up stagnating. Bad things happen, and then bad things keep happening, and then the characters keep thinking about how bad things are, and none of this feels particularly compelling because it's all so samey.

(I also didn't really like all the science-y facts about the ocean and aquatic life; they felt clunky, like they were included only because Armfield did the research and wanted to put them somewhere in the novel.)

I know a novel is a favourite of mine when I can look back on reading it and distinctly remember all of its best moments: the moments that moved me, the moments that surprised me, the moments that made me think. Our Wives Under the Sea is not a novel you can distinctly remember anything about because nothing in this novel ever feels distinct in any way. It all goes by in a blur, and then you're just left with a sense of nothingness that doesn't go anywhere.

Thanks so much to Picador for providing me with an e-ARC of this via Netgalley!

🌊Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield🌊
Publication Date: 03/03/2022
Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Spoiler Free Review:
I am absolutely in love with this book!
The story follows Miri and Leah’s relationship after Leah returns from a deep sea expedition. However, she’s not the same as she was before she left, and Miri struggles to cope with this new version of her wife and the mystery of what has happened to her.
I loved the split narrative of this novel and felt equally invested in both Miri and Leah’s story.
I don’t want to give too many details away about plot but the premise alone had me hooked! (How many books do you see about submarines and deep sea exploration?!)
I haven’t read any of Armfield’s writing before but there were so many genuinely beautiful moments. This book is equally full of romance and mystery - much like the ocean’s depths themselves.
I cannot wait for this book to come out, I’m itching to get my hands on a physical copy to add to my bookshelf.
I think this book is a very strong contender for my favourite book of the year!

When I started to read this book, I felt like it was going to be a five star read. The level of description and immersion (no pun intended) into Miri and Leah's lives - together and apart - was intense. I loved the detail, and how the book was written. However, the intensity made for a very slow read, and I found that the story dragged. I wasn't sure where the book was going, but I knew that it was going too slowly. I would have preferred a lot more pace and a lot less filler. Still, this is quite a unique story, and I kept on reading to the end. Miri and Leah's relationship captivated me. I was left wondering whether the distance between them was seeded long before Leah went away on her research mission, and whether the changes in their relationship were taking place regardless of the events of the book. #nospoilers
The sci-fi elements of the book are introduced almost in a magical realism style - sci-fi realism? - with hints of The Abyss creeping in to drive the deep sea sci-fi home.
It's a good book, and I enjoyed it, but I found the action too protracted to be able to rate it any higher.

4.5 stars.

This was a quietly creepy, slow and sprawling, beautifully written little gothic horror novel. The prose is lyrical, but subtly unnerving, and I loved the dual perspective spanning the past and present of the story, Some of the body horror style imagery viscerally unsettled me, which is always a sign of strong writing! The cover is also stunning, and I can't wait to have a physical copy for my shelf upon its release.

(Many thanks to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for the eARc in exchange for an honest review.)

I liked this one a lot. It is a slow, sad, book about the various ways we can disintegrate, with an intriguing central mystery at is heart.

This book is really amazing, one of my favourites of this year. I read her collection of short stories previously and absolutely loved it, so I was quite excited to read this novel and it certainly did not disappoint. I love the relationship between the main characters and the weird fablelike aspects of the narrative. I will definitely recommend this book.

I tore through this book in a few days and enjoyed every moment. This book slowly creeps up on you and leaves you returning to it and its characters long after the end. A creepy, quietly devastating story about love and loss, told deftly and with a light touch.

I've had a hard time with literary fiction in the past few years. I've struggled with its theme and language, tending to think it pretentious and flowery, and thinking maybe it's just not the genre for me anymore.

But then comes along Our Wives Under the Sea. It is a devastating and beautiful novella, that starts deceptively simple, a relationship under strain after one partner returns home from a mission much later than they were supposed to. But it emerges into something much more mysterious.

The character work is lovely, with Miri and Leah distinct and flawed, both with their own baggage. The language is poetic and confident, but it does not make the fatal error of piling metaphor on metaphor, nor trying to be too lyrical. It shifts its genres deftly, but without losing its identity. And while some of the twists can be seen coming, it never does fully resolve the mystery of what happened down in the deep.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for a free copy of this book.

Wow, wow, wow! I knew when I read Salt Slow that Julia Armfield was an explosive talent, but nothing would have prepared me for how brilliant this debut novel is. Beautifully written - strange, lovely, sad, scary, and funny in equal parts - and with such a bravely-executed, fresh perspective. I loved how it sits between genres, floating between styles. Armfield particularly captures the difficulties and joys of relationships, with a partner, with friends, with strangers, and - perhaps most strikingly of all here for me - with parents, with such nuance. This brilliant observational talent is used to varying effect throughout: devastating and full of good humour, sometimes at the the same time.

Perhaps a strange comparison, but those who found themselves addicted to BBC's Vigil for its claustrophobic nautical setting, high-tension, and powerful over-arching love story should reach for this literary debut right away.

This is a weird book but an intriguing one. In a way, it’s more about the sea and its mysteries rather than the characters. Miri, the wife, has a partner, Leah, who disappears on a mysteriously organised deep-sea submarine dive which ends in apparent disaster. Somehow, she returns but, something of her has been left behind or, perhaps more accurately, she has returned with something from the abyss!

There are two accounts here, one by Miri and the other by Leah. Miri is, firstly, distraught at Leah’s disappearance then delighted at her return and then records her increasing detachment and her transformation into something ‘rich and strange’. Leah has always been drawn to the sea and the opportunity to make this dive is one she rejoices in, even when things go wrong. In reality, the submarine should not survive its sinking and should not be able to maintain the lives of its three passengers on the seabed. The way that it does this suggests that the disaster may have been the purpose of the mission from the start. There are questions which no one seems able to answer.

It’s a satisfying read which just about holds on to a sense of reality despite the extraordinary events. The ending simply underlines how much we don’t know about the deep oceans and what might be living there. At the same time, it’s slightly unconvincing in the sense that all these things are happening to Leah and Miri does none of the obvious things. The events take place in a limited and constrained bubble.

However, if you go along with that it’s a good read and an interesting notion.

This book has a tense claustrophobic feel . You almost know what’s coming, but it is written in a way that makes you want to continue reading.

When somebody asks me the things I find most frightening, the sea never seems to make the list; I don't think of myself as someone scared of the sea. I wade in it, sometimes, I swim in it, I like to watch the waves from the dunes and gather the shells it washes up on the shore.

But I can't think about it for too long. I can't let my mind wander very deep before I start to feel absolute & visceral panic over water too cloudy to make out more than indistinct shapes, over the gloom as I imagine myself sinking, over the brief, slick contact of something touching my ankle, over the vastness and the alienness and the lack of air. I've had dreams of being in the sea behind glass, people watching me as I flail, too deep to resurface, the glass impossible to break and free myself, behind me a murky, impenetrable darkness full of movement I can't see.

Reading this book felt like that dream; I closed it with the same half-frantic gulp of air I wake with. Other dreams, too, dreams about spitting teeth, dreams about tearing skin, dreams about dissolving, body horror dreams that are universal and yet still feel intensely personal when you read them in someone else's words. Dreams about being replaced, being a replacement, or, worse, knowing that someone you love has been replaced, is being replaced, is wrong somehow.

I loved the weird crawling thrill of reading my nightmares given shape and subtlety. I loved the sad, strange, dissociative hollowness it left me with. I loved the texture of Julia Armfield's writing in salt slow and I love it again, newly, here; the pacing of the descent, the leeching away of light and warmth, it feels tight, taut, slow enough for the sickly churn of anticipation, never slow enough to stall.

Rating: 5/5

This is the lesbian cosmic-aquatic horror I never knew was missing from my life. I think I might be head over heels in love. (Spoiler warning.)

The prose is fluid, soft and grieving one moment and overwhelmingly forceful the next. Her command over language is beautiful. Not one page in and I was already mesmerized. A line of tension draws throughout the novel, inching forward slowly yet always baiting me forward. I never felt bored. I always wanted to keep going, wanted to know. I think I was as desperate as Miri was. I would compare it to Lovecraft, but that would be an insult to Armfield's vastly superior work.

That said, the pace is rather slow; it's not a breakneck thriller where new revelations come at every corner. It's more of a dripping faucet. That is ideal for me, though. I like slow thrillers, where nothing is rushed and the pain and grief are luxuriated in rather than pushed to the side.

I will say that the novel also ended with a lot of loose ends. As a reader, that was somewhat unsatisfying; I do think that the story stands on its own and the ending works, but I also want to spend more time in this world with these characters. I want to know more about the Center, what happened to Matteo, what and how Miri does with her life now that Leah is gone. I don't know if there's a second novel planned, but if there is, I will be first in line to descend.

The idea is sound - woman goes away on deep sea expedition, disappears for months and comes back strangely changed, perhaps she is turning in to a fish? The woman's wife is understandably troubled; her love is spending a lot of time in the bath, loves a salty drink and her features are rearranging themselves into a flat fish. So far, so good but it just did not grab me.

Perhaps it would have worked better as a short story because it went on and on. I know that submarines are claustrophobic, and I know that having your love disappear and return not the same person is unsettling, but that middle section was hard work. Towards the end I was hoping that the author would take a tip from Melissa Broder's 'The Pisces' - I was there for a torrid underwater romance with a creature from the deep - perhaps that is was happened, I really did want the ending to involve squid man or King Neptune rising up and claiming Leah but it was all a bit damp and disappointing.

Julia Armfield’s hotly-anticipated debut novel reads like a queer variation on a changeling myth, occupying an unusual space between horror, speculative fiction and grim fairy tale. Armfield’s story’s tightly, almost stiflingly, focused on Miri and Leah, a married couple who’ve settled into comfortable intimacy only interrupted by Leah’s marine research taking her away for stretches of time. But then something goes horribly wrong, a field trip that should’ve taken weeks turns to months, Miri has no sense of what’s happened to Leah or where she is, and the mysterious institute that employs her seems unwilling or unable to help. Then Leah returns but she’s not the woman she was, and things slowly but surely deteriorate. Armfield alternates between Leah's and Miri’s voices: Leah gradually revealing what took place after a supposedly routine expedition stranded her, with her crew, in the deepest, murkiest depths of the ocean; Miri in the present desperately trying to work out what’s become of the Leah she knew.

Armfield’s talked about her love of horror movies and their influence on her particular brand of queer gothic, so maybe it’s not surprising that images from films kept running through my head while reading this: everything from “The Abyss”, “The Deep” and “Sphere” to “Extant” and “The Astronaut’s Wife.” All narratives that hinge on the aftermath of mysterious encounters with the wilderness of space or the ocean deeps, this seems very much in the same vein albeit with a more literary, lyrical dimension and an emphasis on a peculiarly Lovecraftian, feminist body horror. But it’s also an exploration of grief, being tied to a relationship you know’s dying, cut off from reality, mired in sorrow and the anticipation of loss. Armfield cleverly parallels past and present: Leah entombed in a claustrophobic vessel, strange, uncanny sounds penetrating from beyond its thin hull; Miri and Leah reunited, isolated in their tiny flat, oppressed by the continuous din of their neighbours’ TV.

There was a lot I really liked about this, it’s pleasingly melancholy and atmospheric, and I enjoyed Armfield’s portrayal of the minutiae of Miri and Leah’s relationship, as well as the rich detailing of Leah’s fascination with oceanic expeditions and marine biology – opening up environmentalist themes akin to aspects of VanderMeer’s Project X sequence. But there were also elements I found frustrating, Miri’s segments were slow-moving and slightly repetitive particularly compared to the more concrete developments represented in Leah’s side of the story. Some of the imagery felt overdone, the repeated references to teeth, for example, which started to read like parody - presumably tracing back to Armfield’s previous research on the body in literature. And I was very uncertain about the final stages of the book, there were numerous points where the phrase "jumping the shark" came to mind. Although part of my problem might relate to how heavily hyped this one's been, laden with advance praise from people like Sarah Waters and Florence Welch, so I think I came to it with overly high expectations.

Our Wives Under The Sea is a disquieting novel about a woman dealing with her wife returning after a deep sea mission gone wrong and realising that things cannot go back to how they were. Miri's wife Leah went down on a submarine for a research project and didn't come back for six months, far longer than she was meant to be gone, and now she's back, she's not the same, distant and unsettling. Not knowing what happened or what will happen to Leah, Miri has to try and navigate an unknown reality whilst grieving for their past life together.

The atmosphere of this book is amazing, a deeply eerie world both above and below sea level, and it really gets across the isolation not only of Leah when under the sea, but Miri now that Leah is back. In a sense, it is about unknowable horror, but in another sense, it is about what happens when the person you love changes and you have to stand by and watch. The book moves between longer chapters from Miri's present perspective and shorter chapters that are Leah documenting what happened underwater, and these work well together, leaving you unsettled by both parts of the narrative and unfolding as much about Miri and Leah's past together as Leah's being trapped underwater in a way that cleverly combines horror and love story, both understated.

This novel felt like a really good concept for a story expanded into something rich and lyrical that meditates on loneliness, love, and what might be lurking under the sea. It isn't about answers, but about unknowable depths and what happens when things don't seem to be making sense but you just have to keep going anyway.

"Gorgeous, creepy, totally suppressive, a book destined to be read and reread."

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of salt slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep 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 different sets of eyes”.

Miri’s wife, Leah, gets stuck on a deep-sea expedition, and when she returns, Miri is overjoyed - but Leah has changed, beneath the sea, and what follows is a heartbreaking, deeply unsettling, and utterly captivating portrait of love and pain. I am an enormous fan of Armfield’s work; her collection of short stories, salt slow, is one of my all-time favs. So I went into this novel hungry for more weirdness, and I was not disappointed.

Like much of Armfield’s work, the novel is difficult to categorise. It’s a queer love story, a horror novel, a medidiation on grief. It’s slender - my digital copy clocked in at just under 200 pages - but packs in so much. The dual narrative skips back and forth between Miri in the present and Leah in the past, so we learn some of what happened to Leah while also feeling Miri’s present feelings about what happened to Leah. It’s a clever structure that reveals subtly and slowly, never quite telling us the story we want or expect.

Armfield instead gives us a story filled with unease and ambiguity, and horrible little details that will stay in my mind for some time. But it’s also a tender love story - the love between Miri and Leah is palpable, bleeding off the page for both parties. They are deeply obsessed with one another in the most gorgeous way, and the bond between them is so clear, and so deep.

Because Armfield is an incredible writer, the novel is also really good on modern life, and all its little frustrations - Leah repeatedly trying to get hold of a person on a phone line, casual homophobia towards a lesbian couple, characters losing their college education to remebering “methods of treating black mould...passworeds and roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer”. These real-world anxieties push up against the quasi-supernatural events that are also taking place, leaving the reader as confused, helpless and unsettled as Miri.

In short, Our Wives Under The Sea is going to be one of the books of 2022 - it’s a haunting, dizzying, outrageous, terrifying read, rich in texture and feeling. I can’t wait to read it all over again when it’s released.