Our Take

Julia Armfield's stunning debut is a haunting meditation on love and loss that defies easy categorization—part gothic horror, part tender romance, and wholly unforgettable. Armfield crafts prose that is simultaneously elegant and unsettling, with sentences so exquisitely wrought that you'll find yourself underlining passages on nearly every page. The novel operates in the liminal space between genres, blending the claustrophobic submarine terror of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation with the emotional devastation of a relationship slowly unraveling. What makes this book extraordinary is how Armfield uses the metaphor of the ocean—with all its hidden teeth and unknowable depths—to explore the pockets of mystery that exist even in our most intimate relationships. Miri's desperate search for answers mirrors the universal experience of watching someone you love transform into a stranger, whether through illness, trauma, or simply time. The alternating perspectives between Miri on land and Leah underwater create a structure that's both formally innovative and emotionally resonant, building suspense through quiet dread rather than jump scares. For readers drawn to the atmospheric dread of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House or the surreal body horror of Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, Armfield offers similar pleasures with a distinctly queer sensibility. A Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, and more, winner of the 2023 Polari Book Prize, and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, this is literary horror at its most achingly poetic—spooky, romantic, and utterly mesmerizing.