Our Wives Under the Sea

My Goodreads review of this book just says, “Yes yes yes yes yes this is the good stuff,” if you want a sign of my emotional reaction to Our Wives Under the Sea.

This is a gorgeous, compact, spooky, haunting novel about a marriage falling apart, and it came into my life at exactly the right time. Miri’s wife, Leah, is an undersea explorer who vanishes for months under the water without a trace. Finally, she returns—but has all of Leah come back?

I would call this half dark fantasy horror, half contemporary queer literary fiction. Or Mitski meets The… show more.

Sometimes you want to read something that’s just a little bit weird, and this book certainly delivers.

Deep sea strangeness, a creeping sense of unreality, and an achingly beautiful sapphic romance made this book a star of my reading year. If you’re interested in the mysteries of the deep sea or just want to read some truly beautiful writing, I highly recommend it.

The ship in this book (a submarine, in this case) features in unsettling flashbacks.

Miri’s wife, Leah, is a marine biologist, and on a routine trip to the bottom of the ocean, a malfunction on the sub means she and the crew remain down there much longer than anticipated. When she returns, she’s not the same. Armfield’s writing is stunning, perfectly encapsulating the strangeness of life at the bottom of the ocean.

This is an eerie but incredibly moving book about relationships and grief.

Our Wives Under the Sea feels almost unclassifiable to me, in the best way possible. Is it speculative? Yes. Is it horror? Sort of. Is it also a love story? Yes.

Written in dreamy, lyrical, meandering prose, it follows Miri and Leah in the aftermath of Leah, a marine biologist, having finally returned from a deep-sea trip that took a horrifying turn, though we aren’t entirely sure what happened down there. All we know is, Leah is traumatized and definitely not herself. It is gorgeous, suspenseful, and devastating. Plus, it has the energy of that girlfriend meme: “Would you still… show more.

This is a brilliant novel in which we experience the lives of two women and the challenge that a mysterious absence forces upon their marriage. Armfield creates two very distinct characters and presents an utterly convincing relationship between them, in part by alternating between first-person accounts from both perspectives, showing us how both characters deal with being apart and then, after an unsettling encounter experienced deep in the ocean, how they deal with being back together. It’s when they’re reunited that we see how loss can be a long, ongoing process. Our Wives Under the Sea is wonderfully weird, and… show more.