RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksDeath and the ocean beguile Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea, a work that plumbs with striking subtlety what it feels like to live with the mystery of both ... Centered around Leah’s attempt to settle back at home, the story masterfully captures a different kind of intimate grief: the feeling of separateness that continues between the two women even after Leah resurfaces. After an experience of transformation, Armfield suggests, reunion can feel as much like a loss as it does a regaining. Blending elements of horror, gothic, and realism, Our Wives Under the Sea takes the bottom of the ocean as a speculative topography on which to explore the terrors of the mysterious gravitational pull we exert on each other ... Armfield charges at the question of what it feels like to live on the edges of knowledge, infusing moments of horror and surrealism into the everyday ... The experience of reading Armfield’s novel feels like a descent into deep water, a study in adapting to conditions of intensifying darkness and pressure ... the novel’s glacial pace only worked, in my opinion, to attune readers even more subtly to the subtext beyond every laconic observation, the way that — in troubled intimacy especially — any calm surface might belie tumult churning just beyond what can be named ... Armfield’s work is an elliptical, leaky manual on how to live in the half-known life: the in-betweens of intimacy, the flux of not knowing, and the waves of surrealism that inundate the everyday.
