Our Wives Under The Sea

Reviews

This haunting novel is beautifully written and artfully narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway...Thanks to fine performances, Leah's diary entries, Miri's flashbacks, and the unimaginable mystery of the deep ocean all seem real. Listeners won't want to miss this genre-bending love story. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2022 Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers, Our Wives Under The Sea moves fluidly between horror story and love story, the gorgeous and the grotesque. A contemporary gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness. Julia Armfield’s weird and wonderful debut feels fresh (or rather, salty) . . . You hear a lot of people lamenting the death of innovation in contemporary fiction . . . and Armfield is a brilliant counterpoint. Frightening, otherworldly, but above all gripping. Sharp, atmospheric, dryly funny, sad, distinctive . . . There is an almost spiritual endlessness to its quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep and then deeper again. Our Wives Under The Sea is a hypnotic and affecting love story - an exploration of intimacy and its opposites, as well as of incomprehension, absence and unfathomable uncertainty. As in her stories, Armfield is extremely good at anatomising the women’s relationship: the self-defensive blindnesses, the resentments and rituals and angers, grief for vanished joys – all the small moments of which lasting love consists. There are clever lines, everywhere, and wry, funny ones. Part bruisingly tender love story, part nerve-clanging submarine thriller. Creative innovation is there if you’re looking for it — and to anyone lamenting its loss: order a copy . . . There is such tenderness in the precision of these observations of long-term love and such eerie estrangement when the uncanny intrudes. Eventually, the two moods fuse at the novel’s heart-slicing, cinematic climax. I’ll be thinking about it for ages — and checking the bathtub for grit. 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). Julia Armfield’s haunting debut novel deftly weaves a love story into creeping horror. . .Our Wives Under The Sea is a quiet triumph, but beware – this unsettling, saltwater-soaked story seeps deeper than you think. A strange, unnerving novel that wrongfoots you at every turn and invites you to think again about loss, absence, and transformation, Our Wives Under The Sea also returns wholly original answers to that great question, 'Where did we come from, where are we going?' It is a beautiful, lyrically written elegy. A wonderful novel, deeply romantic and fabulously strange. I loved this book. Beautiful, otherworldly, like floating through water with your eyes open. 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. Reading this book is like diving into the deepest depths of the ocean and finding beautiful and disturbing wonders. Our Wives is spooky and romantic: a gorgeous, lyrical novel that gets under your skin. Armfield leads you softly through a story that feels epic and intimate at the same time. Tender, strange, lucid, and so assured – comparisons feel insubstantial, but if you love sci fi or love stories or books that defy labels or chew-your-arm-off good writing, this is for you. A mesmerizing triumph. Julia Armfield has created a surprisingly seamless novel: it is a love story, a grief story, a question without end. It's a tale of the sea that swallows you whole and breaks your heart in the very best way. It is tender and funny. It is shockingly bold. Without a doubt, it 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. Strange and romantic . . . a deeply unnerving elegy to memory. A modern fable about grief, love, and what really lies deep at the bottom of the ocean. Essential and haunting. Lyrical and moving.

Armfield’s novel expertly interweaves fairy-tale and horror motifs with a moving and intimate portrayal of loss.

Otherworldliness infuses the everyday with a haunting lucidity. This gorgeously written tale confirms
Julia Armfield as a master of the domestic uncanny, and of observing human relationships.

A modern-day myth about love, grief and the depths of the ocean that moves fluidly between romance and horror. Deeply romantic and devastating Expand reviews