Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

Horror

LGBTQ+

Literary Fiction

240 Pages

"A deeply queer, deeply romantic novel chock-full of stunning sentences. Our Wives Under the Sea is beautiful, otherworldly, like floating through water with your eyes open. I genuinely missed the characters when it ended."

Synopsis

Miri thinks she has got her wife back when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home. Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night, spending hours submerged in the bathtub. As Miri searches desperately for answers from the mysterious organization that sent Leah into the depths, she must face the possibility that the woman she married may never truly come back. Our Wives Under The Sea is a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep, deep sea—a contemporary gothic fairy tale that explores the unknowable depths within each of us.

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.