Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a quiet earthquake, slowly rearranging your emotions through ever-growing tension and terror while simultaneously being incredibly tender. And this is how I spent my vacation travel time with a slow-burn, haunting and heartbreaking work that examines loss within the framework of horror, something most would probably not recommend as relaxation reading but for me it was infectiously perfect. When Florence Welch recommends a book, I have to read it. Tye Cattanach is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.‘ To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.’ Armfield has exactly the ‘right sort of skin’ in which the most fantastical and marvellous of stories can thrive. Not since Angela Carter or Sonya Hartnett have I been so captivated or fascinated by a writer. I say yet to read it because it is my belief that everyone should read it. It is near impossible to talk about this magical, grotesque, beautiful book without spoiling the plot for someone who has yet to read it. Miri is overjoyed to have her wife returned to her, except Leah is different now.
Leah has returned to Miri after a deep-sea mission went devastatingly wrong.
Part horror story, all love story, Our Wives Under the Sea tells the tale of married couple Miri and Leah. Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most anticipated novels of 2022, and from the very first page, it is clear why. So vivid are her stories, so fully realised are her characters, one can’t help but willingly suspend any and all disbelief and let oneself sink into her world as easily as one might sink into a warm bath – or slip below the waves, deep into the sea. Armfield’s great gift lies in her ability to convince her reader that the bizarre, strange, gothic imaginings on the page before them could absolutely happen in the real world. Her 2019 debut collection of short stories, Salt, Slow, confirmed that here was a writer capable of extraordinary things. I first encountered Julia Armfield’s enormous aptitude for storytelling when I read her short story ‘The Great Awake’, which won The White Review Short Story Prize in 2018. All they need is the right sort of skin.”’ ‘“What you have to understand,” she says “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions.
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