A Best Book of the Year (NPR, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, The Telegraph, Goodreads, Tor.com, them, and more)
A Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Fiction
A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist
A Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlistee
“Shocking…Achingly poetic…Sharp and beautiful as coral polyps…Armfield exercises an exquisite—even sadistic—sense of suspense. She’s cleverly designed this story so that we only gradually become aware of how little we know. ‘Panic is a misuse of oxygen,’ Leah warns, but by the climax of this eerie novel, I was misusing it with abandon.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“A deeply strange and haunting novel in the best possible way…An impressive and exciting debut novel that may leave you thinking about your own relationships in a new light.”
—NPR
"A haunting, evocative novel that juxtaposes the horrors beneath the waves with the life and love that exist on land."
—TIME
“Armfield uses this mysterious setup to explore anticipatory grief and the limits of human understanding, and I was a little changed after reading Our Wives Under the Sea, too.”
—The New York Times
“Sublimely gorgeous…Readers are treated to a stunning love story about a couple trying to make sense of their new unfamiliar situation, while also learning about what happened to Leah on the ocean floor. It’s pretty much perfect.”
—Liberty Hardy, BookRiot
"Hypnotic...Gripped me from the first chapter...Armfield is unafraid to deal with uncomfortable issues, asking readers how much it’s possible to ever really know someone, no matter how long you’ve been with them. I savored each delicious sentence of Our Wives Under the Sea, underlining passages on almost every page, and genuinely missed the characters when it ended."
—BuzzFeed
“Armfield has written a novel so chock-full of stunning sentences that that urge to scream needled its way into me throughout my first and second reads of the book…It isn’t an obvious monster novel, but I consider it a monster novel in its own way. A deeply queer one, a deeply romantic one.”
—Autostraddle
“Original and haunting.”
—People Magazine (Best New Books)
“If you're in the mood to cry, then Julia Armfield wrote the perfect book for ya… Armfield breaks your heart over and over (but in a good way, promise).”
—Cosmopolitan
“A love story like no other…Armfield’s fantastic first novel is about the pockets of unknowability that pop up in even the longest intimacies, how marriage, like the ocean, is full of ‘the teeth it keeps half-hidden.’”
—Electric Literature
“Eerie and wonderful…A tender love story…A strange, sad, funny, ethereal book. Its final act is achingly beautiful and utterly terrifying. I still don’t quite know what to make of Our Wives Under the Sea, but I can’t stop thinking about it.”
—Lit Hub
“Armfield’s gorgeous prose weaves a strangely romantic tale of love and loss that might just leave you viewing your own relationships differently.”
—them
“One of my favorites of this (and any other) year…Funny, wise, and often devastating.”
—Tor.com
“[Armfield’s] insights into the grieving process sometimes stop you in your tracks…Moving and evocative…Kept me turning the pages. Armfield has a deep feel for language…The final scene in Miri’s narrative absolutely floored me…It moves me to tears just thinking about it now.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
"[A] masterpiece...Deeply romantic and devastating."
—Refinery29
“Engrossing...Armfield's tale is a blissfully strange, poetically written, fantastical voyage into a relationship.”—Bay Area Reporter
“Captivating and at times heartbreaking.”
—SheReads
“A moody and intimate debut novel, both a portrait of a marriage and a subtle horror fantasy…With echoes of Jules Verne, Thor Heyerdahl, H.P. Lovecraft, and the film Altered States, Armfield anchors the shudder-producing tale in authentic marine science and a deep understanding of human nature. This is mesmerizing.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married?...Launching her book with epigraphs from both Moby-Dick and Jaws, Armfield guides the reader through the liminal spaces in the couple’s lives and approaches them with an occasionally ironic humor. The bleakest horror story can also be a love story; Armfield deftly illustrates how.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Without a doubt, Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the best books I've ever read. It's not only art, it's a perfect miracle. We are lucky for it.”
—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
“A wonderful novel, deeply romantic and fabulously strange. I loved this book.”
—Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet
“I was entirely captivated by this book. A gorgeous debut.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You and The Middlesteins
“Beautiful, otherworldly, like floating through water with your eyes open.”
—Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters and Everything Under
“Julia Armfield is one of my favorite writers. Our Wives Under the Sea is a contemporary gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness.”
—Florence Welch, lead singer of Florence + the Machine
“This phenomenal book is a marriage tale unlike any other. Thrilling, funny and exquisitely crafted, this book will make you question everything while it keeps you up all night turning its pages.” —Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk
“A strange, unnerving novel that wrongfoots you at every turn and invites you to think again about loss, absence, and transformation. A lyrically written elegy.”
—Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
“Tender, strange, lucid, and so assured. If you love sci-fi or love stories or books that defy labels or chew-your-arm-off good writing, this is for you.”
—Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
“Spooky and romantic: a gorgeous novel that gets under your skin. Armfield leads you softly through a story that feels epic and intimate at the same time.”
—Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark
“Delicate and horrifying, Our Wives Under The Sea is a darkly brilliant novel that submerges the reader’s imagination in the depths of the unknown.”
—Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy
“Reading this book is like diving into the deepest depths of the ocean and finding beautiful and disturbing wonders.”
—Kirsty Logan, author of Things We Say in the Dark
★ 05/09/2022
Armfield follows her collection, Salt Slow, with a moody and intimate debut novel, both a portrait of a marriage and a subtle horror fantasy. Miri and Leah are a married lesbian couple living in a British coastal city. Leah, a scientist with the Centre for Marine Enquiry, participates with her submarine crew in a deep-sea dive that is supposed to take three weeks but instead lasts six months, due to a malfunction, and Miri’s reactions range from helpless panic to anger to acceptance and mourning as she phones desperately to get answers from the Centre. (She even joins an online community of role-playing women who imagine their husbands are astronauts in space.) When Leah returns, she begins exhibiting such symptoms as the “silvering” of her skin, sleepwalking, loss of appetite, and a need to be near or in water. She also spends hours in the bathroom with the taps running and a sound machine playing ocean surf sounds, and bleeds frequently: from her nose, gums, and through her skin. While Miri at first looks for a logical explanation for these maladies, their source remains mysterious. Meanwhile, the two have stopped communicating and sleep in separate bedrooms, and it begins to seem as if Leah is transforming into some nonhuman creature. With echoes of Jules Verne, Thor Heyerdahl (whose work inspired Leah), H.P. Lovecraft, and the film Altered States, Armfield anchors the shudder-producing tale in authentic marine science and a deep understanding of human nature. This is mesmerizing. (July)
06/01/2022
DEBUT The multi-award-winning Armfield follows up her ruthlessly beautiful story collection, salt slow, with the arresting tale of two women: Leah, a marine biologist whose research trip to the depths of the Pacific left her stranded on the ocean floor for months in a disabled submarine with two other crew members, and her wife, Miri, desperate during those months and even more desperate when Leah finally returns. Leah is changed—she's obdurately distant, barely speaks, and is obsessed with running the faucets—and an increasingly frustrated Miri gives up everything to try to reach the woman she loves and seems to be losing. Unfolding in tense yet tender flashbacks, their past proves complicated—"The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is the wronged party"—and their present veers toward danger. What was the purpose of the trip, sponsored by a shadowy organization that has since disappeared? Its motives and the hint of conspiracy might have been explored more, but the crucial point is what happened in the effectively rendered dark far beneath the waves. VERDICT A turn toward horror at the end will satisfyingly rachet up the tension for some readers but may discomfit others. Told in stunning language, Armfield's heartrending story of two people forced apart by trauma is enough.
★ 2022-05-25
What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married?
Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Miri’s narrative and excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission relate their growing awareness—and grudging management—of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned; her unanticipated transformation—a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange—challenges Miri’s assumptions about the course of their life together. Structured like the ocean’s levels, deepening and darkening the further one descends, the novel slowly reveals that the horrific situation Leah tolerated may not have not been as accidental as it first seemed. The unearthly circumstances of Leah’s underwater captivity and mutation are horrible enough but take on new meaning in relation to other, more understandable situations Miri has faced in her life: the metamorphosis her mother underwent during a fatal illness and the sometimes-irritating voices she hears constantly emanating from an unseen neighbor’s television. Is Leah's current circumstance just further along the continuum of human understanding of loss and endurance? Launching her book with epigraphs from both Moby-Dick and Jaws, Armfield guides the reader through the liminal spaces in the couple’s lives and approaches them with an occasionally ironic humor.
The bleakest horror story can also be a love story; Armfield deftly illustrates how.
