This book was beautiful, haunting and mysterious and has made me want to read all of Julia Armfields past and future writing - Our Wives Under The Sea is a completely unique story that centres around Miras' wife Leah disappearing in a research submarine for 6 months, eventually returning a completely different person. I especially loved the switching chapters, contrasting Mira and Leahs experience, which made for a completely addictive read - I blasted through this in 24 hours

Have been recommending this to EVERYONE, especially if you are a fan of Daisy Johnsons writing style which I would compare this too!

2 ½ stars (rounded up because i really really really wanted to love this)

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


The cover, title, premise, and early hype around this novel made me think that I was going to love it. Alas, as it often seems to be the case, Our Wives Under The Sea did not work for me. If you are interested in this novel I recommend that you check out more positive reviews.
At first, I gave this novel the benefit of the doubt, but with each chapter, my expectations sunk (ah-ah) lower and lower. This is one of those novels that prioritises language over say characters or story, which is something that I’m sure will work for many types of readers, it just so happens that I am not one of them. Through alternating chapters, Our Wives Under The Sea follows wives Miri and Leah. Their marriage and relationship are very much in limbo after Leah returns from a deep-sea mission gone awry. The experience has clearly altered Leah and Miri struggles to reconcile herself to the fact that the woman she married is no more. In Miri’s chapter, we read of Leah’s strange behaviours: she takes long baths, avoids leaving the house, has frequent nose-bleeds, and seems wholly disassociated from her surroundings. Miri’s chapters also give us some insight into their relationship prior to this disastrous mission (how they met, how they were as a couple, etc.). In Leah’s chapters, which are far shorter, and are meant to highlight her alienated state of mind, we mostly learn about what went on in that mission.

“Every couple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like notecards to guide you round an exhibition.”


In spite of the intimacy achieved by focusing solely on Miri and Leah (secondary characters are very much at the margins of the narrative), I found the novel’s overall tone cold. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I like plenty of authors who write in this slightly ‘distancing’ way (Jhumpa Lahiri and Brandon Taylor come to mind). However, I have to care or be interested in the people they write about. Here, surprisingly enough, I found myself feeling nothing for either Miri or Leah. Their voices were too similar, something that I found rather frustrating. Their inner-monologues and their observations (about others, the past, themselves) were eerily alike. Which made it difficult for me to see them as individuals, but rather they merged into this one water-obsessed figure. And speaking of water, gesù. We have water metaphors and imagery, water-related speculations, and conversations on water/sea/ocean/sea creatures. I understand that the water & the sea are central themes of this novel (if not the theme) however it got repetitive and, worse still, contrived. The author’s language was impressionistic, trying too hard to be direct and gritty ("red mouth in the morning, red chin, red spill into the sink" / "Miri bit at her skin of her lip so often that kissing tasted bloody; metallic zip of a licked battery"). Her prose was too dramatic, full of flashy metaphors ("beneath her shirt, the bones of her shoulder swing the way a hanger will when knocked inside a wardrobe"). There were paragraphs or reflections that I liked or that struck me as insightful and sharp but I wish that I’d felt more attached or emotionally invested in the story. I had a hard time ‘believing’ in our two main characters, perhaps due to a combination of their voices sounding too much alike and they were both so...water obsessed? Their personalities were vague and the author seemed more intent on evoking a certain atmosphere than on providing us with fully dimensional and nuanced characters.
All in all, this novel was a big disappointment. I went in thinking that I would love it, realised a few pages in that the writing was going for this simultaneously dreamlike and raw sort of vibe (which did nothing for me here) and found myself bored by most of the narrative. It didn't elicit any particular feelings or reactions in me. This is the kind of novel that screams MFA. It wants to be stylish and edgy but (and here i remind you that i am merely expressing my own entirely subjective opinion so please don't @ me) but feels contrived and unconvincing. A lot of the dialogues didn't ring true to life, characters' reactions were slightly off, and the narrators' voices were much to similar (that occasionally they address the reader or say things like 'you see' made it all more gimmicky).

Our Wives Under The Sea is an incredible addition to the "came back wrong" subset of horror literature. Readers chasing straight-forward answers will be left unsatisfied- I would have loved to learn more about the shady institute which funded Leah's expedition- but fans of Victor Lavelle's The Changeling and Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians should be content to be intrigued. Content warnings for a fair amount of 'gaslighting' (unsettlingly familiar to anyone with employer-linked health insurance) and body horror specifically involving eyes and skin.

I didn't get on with the writing style of this author unfortunately and did not finish the book. Hopefully it will find its audience but it wasn't for me.

The spell-binding and immersive Our Wives Under The Sea builds on the themes of metamorphosis, grief and loss first visited in Armfield’s previous book of short stories, Salt Slow. The narrative takes place in what feels like a nightmarish present, in which Leah, a marine biologist, has returned from a deep-sea expedition that went tragically wrong, and her wife Miri is trying to navigate the red tape surrounding the incident while dealing with the slow eradication of the woman Leah once was.
The hard elements of plot; the setting of an unnamed city near the sea, the reality of The Centre, Miri and Leah’s history together, are all fraying at the edges, eaten away and eroded by the sea, just as Leah is. The horror of and fascination with our unmapped world, the intimacy, anxiety and claustrophobia of inhabiting a female body (cracked teeth, chewed lips, bleeding gums). These dream-like descriptions contrast with the authentic and modern accounts of the couple’s life prior to Leah’s absence; a love story, a discovery of sex and sexuality, the fact of their former closeness only making their subsequent distance more heartbreaking.
I wasn’t expecting a fantastical/sci-fi element to the story and I’m glad I wasn’t aware of it in advance as that’s not usually a genre that holds a massive amount of interest. Armfield’s writing is emotive yet controlled and distanced; beautiful and devastatingly sad.

Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley.

What an absolutely beautiful and haunting story! I've been looking for a 'different' horror novel and I'm so glad I found this. Definitely my book of 2021!!

A haunting and grim look at grief and loss, Our Wives Under the Sea develops the best bits of Armfield's short story collection (salt slow) - bodily horror, sharp and scary images, compelling narrative, cutting moments of human pain and the difficulties of relationships. The book is well-researched, incorporating marine biology and geography to encapsulate the sheer horror of the ocean, its vast and terrifying potential, conveying that the sea makes the perfect horror story setting as a result of its reality: rather than creating her own supernatural, super scary environment, Armfield makes this place of science, fact and exploration the height of horror. The language is claustrophobic and taut with tension in a way that mirrors Leah's submarine experience; is fluid and flowing and bursting in a way that mirrors the water that runs through the narrative.

Armfield is just so good at creating stories that make the body the site of pain, gruesomeness, repulsion, and interweaves her compelling narratives with moving explorations of human interaction and suffering that go ocean-deep.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I loved the beginning and it has some stunning sentences. If I'd had a physical copy I would of underlined so much! About half way through though I got really tired of the stream of conscious narration and the lack of anything exciting happening. There was so much that could of been so creepy but it just felt as if things were going round in circles. Especially considering how short it was! In the end I just couldn't finish it.
In this case I would recommand her short story collection over this. It has the same feel but doesn't leave you waiting for the twist,

If Rory Power and the Doctor Who episode Waters of Mars had a baby, Our Wives Under The Sea would be the sodden offspring. Written in an almost-romantic style, Armfield tells the story of Miri and her wife Leah, who had something happen to her during a routine submarine voyage. Armfield is both descriptive and scarce, telling the reader everything, and yet nothing at the same time.
Miri’s chapters are broken up with short moments from Leah in the past, trapped in a sinking vessel that doesn’t seem entirely out of anyone’s control. I would have loved to had more of Leah’s perspective because I felt that there wasn’t a resolute ending or an answer – but of course that was clearly Armfield’s vision.
I would also commend her on her use of body horror, Leah’s disintegration wasn’t scary or meant to shock, it was just something happening to her physical body, and Miri was still tender and loving towards her. I read this book all in one go during my lunch break, and came back onto the shop floor feeling unsettled, the image of Leah’s eye caught in my brain.
When this book is published, I am definitely expecting big things. I also can’t wait to buy a physical copy as e-reading doesn’t give the full experience, and that cover – Wow! Our Wives Under The Sea will definitely stay with the reader for a long time, and maybe give them second thoughts about eating calamari.
Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

Our Wives Under The Sea is a beautiful, haunting, eerie and unique novel. Much like the vast ocean that Julia Armfield describes throughout, this novel too has great depth. It is a story of love, of grief and the mysteries of the deep, deep ocean and what it leaves behind.

Our Wives Under The Sea is written from the perspectives of Miri and her wife Leah, across alternative chapters. Leah has finally returned to Miri after a deep sea research mission that went very, very wrong. Whilst Miri is grateful to have her wife home, it would seem that the Leah who came back isn’t her quite right, and doesn’t seem to be her Leah.

Armfield very cleverly used the duel narrative to tell us two different interwoven stories. Through Miri we found out how they fell in love, about Miri’s relationship with her own mother and what happens following Leah’s return. Through Leah we find out where her love of the ocean came from and what happened down in the depths of the ocean as things went very wrong. This is such clever storytelling and makes it almost impossible to put the book down, you are constantly searching for what could have happened, and indeed what is happening to Leah.

This novel also contains a rather stunning exploration of grief. We are witness to both traditional grief, after the passing of a loved one (the women’s parents) and a different kind of grief, that of not knowing whether someone will come back to you or not. Armfield makes the most beautiful point on this; that if grief is the coping mechanism of those left behind, then if you are left with the ambiguity of their return you are also at the mercy of the possibility of reversal of fortunes, and so with goes your ability to cope. Another character describes this more as a haunting than anything else. It’s such a fascinating and moving exploration of grief.

This is a novel that is as beautiful as it is haunting. It is otherworldly, whilst still being rooted in what it is to love and be loved. It’s a fantastic debut novel and I look forward to reading Armfield’s previously published collection of short stories.

This book shocked me right out of a reading slump and blew me away. I was so looking forward to this after falling in love with Armfield’s short story collection, Salt Slow, but Our Wives exceeded all my expectations and had me clinging to every word. The prose is so lyrical, so poetic, and so haunting; the descriptions are like pictures I wish I could frame and hang on my walls; the imagery is so shockingly clever it made me pause and reread line time and again.

I can’t emphasise how much I loved this - Julia Armfield is brilliant.

strange and unsettling and beautiful, like looking at sunlight from underwater—i can't wait to re-read (and to own) a physical copy!

This is probably one of the most unusual and haunting books I’ve read for a long time, with such stunning and assured writing it’s difficult to believe this is Julia Armfield’s debut novel. The story is in two parts running alongside; the present day where Leah returns from her mission increasingly strange and unwell, and the past where Leah is writing about what is happening on board the submarine. Leah’s wife Miri, struggles to cope with the Leah who has returned. Her wife is not how she was and is out of control of any sort of recovery. It’s difficult to say too much about this change without giving spoilers, but the way Leah returns but is not the same person, not whole, is truly frightening. Miri has her wife back after she had thought she was dead, but she misses her now than before. This is haunting to read, but written in ordinary careful everyday prose, so you don’t doubt the possibility of this happening at all, it’s completely credible and the details feel authentic whilst being also the strangest and most incredible.
The context of this is also their past, a sweet and quirky love story between the two women, Miri feeling apart from life until the lovely Leah turns up, helping her laugh at herself. The two of them make a good life for themselves together, a good team, ‘a fused, inextricable thing’ as Miri says early in the book. It’s all ‘a long time ago’ that they met but Miri remembers some of the tiny things that made her love Leah and the game they used to have remembering their early times together. Their love is in the memories as well as their cosy present life, but when Leah comes back from her mission this is all different and they can’t return to how they were. Although this is a book of huge drama in some ways, the small details also stick with you – the types of books that Miri likes, the noisy neighbours that they never actually see, watching ‘Jaws’ together, Miri’s prickly mother that she loved ‘hard and at a distance’. It’s a book of the ordinary and everyday but also a book of terrifying and amazing things as well with some sentences that I had to read twice to make sure I’d understood what the writer had said. It’s a book that could be read a second or third time I think, and be just as interesting and new each time.

Actual rating 3.5/5 stars.

Leah left her wife, Miri, for a deep sea expedition that went horribly wrong. As her crew lost power inside their submarine and their connection with the world above, they hurtled to the sea bed and the darkness that awaited them there.

When she returned, she did so as a shadow of her former self, both physically and mentally. Blood seeps from her nose, her pores, and her gums. She spends more time immersed in bathwater than anywhere else. She does not speak about what she was exposed to. Miri does not know how to help her and is as eager to have the Leah she knew returned as she is to have an understanding for what emerged from the dark depths along with the woman she loves.

Mine was the first review not to award this book a full five stars, so definitely take it with a pinch of salt. There was an equal amounts of both beauty and horror here and I'm always eager to read a LGBT+ story in any genre, but especially horror. However, whilst I appreciated the slow unfurling of the storyline and the gorgeous quality of the writing, I also felt some sort of discontent to the events that featured. Maybe literary horror is merely not for me? I'm not sure. I'm glad to have experienced this story and do appreciate many elements of it. I liked what this book contained and can't accurately describe what did not work for me here. Ultimately, it did not appeal like I imagined it would and my enjoyment did not match my anticipation for the story.

I have mixed feelings about this.
I found the language and the poetic vision were exquisite and well controlled. It works very well as a meditation on what we are made of and asks puzzling, intriguing questions about our ancientness, as beings who are made from the materials of this planet. That's lovely.
Also the author is able to use these meditations to subtly 'explain' what is going on. She never has to say outright that Leah has been reclaimed mysteriously by the sea, that she went too deep and this triggered an unstoppable natural process. We understand it.
So I see the poetic point in these aspects, and I find it appealing and intriguing, but I don't see it in others.
I think it didn't have the mileage to be a novel. The pacing drags. Quite often, I felt I felt I was reading the same scene or idea repeated, and not in a way that enhanced the poetic and emotional effect. I know that grief can be repetitive, but the author didn't seem to be directing me to look at that. It seemed more that she had to get the book to a certain length, and sometimes had to keep one character treading water (literally or not) while the other could get to something that needed to be at that point of the narrative.
We see stretches of Miri and Leah's relationship before Leah went away. Although these seemed realistic and true to life, I found myself unmoved by them. There was not enough interesting human truth to make them worth reading about, either as individual people or as a relationship. It looked as though they were put in to pad the book to length. Similarly, the details about Miri's mother. I felt the author wasn't interested in these aspects of her book, she seemed most interested in her poetic thesis of humans as constructs of salt, water and other substances. That's fine, but it means we read a lot of generalised relationship material that didn't interest her.
There were some moments I really liked. Miri, the wife left on land, finds online groups of wives who pretend their husbands have gone into outer space. I hoped to see more of this as it's a wonderful idea - they might be fantasists, they might be truly in that situation. This is a whole character thread that could be thoroughtly explored, but it isn't. I liked the fact that it isn't explained, though - it's just the strange, unreal territory of grief that Miri finds herself in. But, like most of the emotional material of the book, it's very static.
So... I think this material was forced into a length that didn't suit it. There's only so far you can take a meditation on what we're made of, and the mysterious world we find ourselves in. For this to move the reader, it needs a closer interest in humanity too. But I enjoyed Julia Armfield's writing and will look for more.

Every October I’m on the lookout for my Halloween read - and this year has delivered early! I’m a fan of Carmen Maria Machado. Armfield well deserves a place beside her on the shelf. This is gorgeously-written horror set within a relatable relationship (the relatability is Armfield’s genius here, surrounded as it is by the supernatural). I must go back and check out her short stories now!

A sapphic novel that centres around the lives of two women Miri and Leah.
Leah returns to her wife following a deep sea mission which has ended in very salty tears. Their relationship takes a turn from bad to worse. A story of love, loss of that love and grief. Elements of the prose are really beautiful. However I’ve awarded 3.5 stars as I found the plot (no spoilers) to be confusing and a little far reaching. Not a huge criticism as the prose is so beautiful it definitely makes me want to read the author’s other novel Salt Slow.

Such a close and claustrophobic piece of writing: the sense of entrapment of a deep-sea vessel under the ocean is mirrored by the intimate relationship of Miri and Leah confined to their flat, both places surrounded by intrusive noises and a sense of alienation. And the gradual disintegration of Leah's bodily surfaces reflects the coming apart of the marriage till that ultimate moment of letting someone go as an act of love.

Armfield's writing is lyrical and sensitive, nicely controlled throughout. It feels like it could have been tautened up just a little in places where it can get a little heavy-handed with watery symbolism. And I liked the submerged (ha!) messages about mystery, unknowability, and things beyond the rational and seen.

Beautiful, creepy, devastating. Truly one of the best literary horror novels I’ve read, and the answer to decades of begging for good gay horror.

I read this book in one setting - I couldn't leave it down. It's such a joy to read a book that is different. As a voracious reader I go through periods where I find many books blend into one. But Our Wives Under the Sea will not. This book will stay with me for a long time. Julia Armfield's writing is effortlessly superb and flows like water.!
At times I felt as though I was in the submarine, it was both claustrophobic and ominous and yet Leah's thoughts of Miri and their relationship somehow allows pockets of air into the stultified environment.
Their relationship is so real, I feel I know them. Leah's gradual wasting away is so beautifully described that it's easy to forget this is not a normal illness.
I loved every part of this book and strongly recommend it.