Miri thought that she had lost that for good, only to have it returned, and now she is understanding that the life the two of them had together is truly over, she is going through the grief of losing a central part of her life twice. Leah’s love for Miri and her need to see her again sustain her through the horrors she is exposed to stranded on the ocean floor, and what makes Leah’s reappearance in Miri’s life so difficult is the fact that Leah completed her life so fully. Both women clearly love each other deeply. This dual perspective allows us to see Miri and Leah’s relationship from both sides, accentuating the tragedy. Our Wives Under The Sea is told in two strands, one from the perspective of Miri after Leah has returned from the ocean, and one from the perspective of Leah as she describes the ill-fated ocean exploration mission that went so horribly wrong. As Leah’s condition grows worse, Miri must deal with the grief of losing the person she loved all over again. What’s worse, the special spark, the secret rapport that Leah and Miri shared, has somehow gone, and Miri feels she is living with a complete stranger, not the woman she decided to spend the rest of her life with. She is bleeding from her skin, barely eating anything, spending all her time submerged in the bathtub. But it soon becomes clear to her that the Leah who has returned is not the same as the Leah who left.

When Leah suddenly reappears, Miri is relieved and overjoyed. Miri’s wife Leah has been missing for six months, after a deep sea mission goes wrong.

Our Wives Under The Sea is as lyrical and moving as it is frightening and discomforting, and its human core makes its exploration of the Weird all the more powerful. Armfield brings the scares and expertly ratchets up the tension, but at the heart of the novel is the relationship between Miri and Leah, their love for each other and how it perseveres under incredible strain. Our Wives Under The Sea is wonderfully uncanny, drawing on all our fears of the unknown horrors lurking at the bottom of the ocean and visceral body horror, but also on our more mundane fears about the loneliness of the human condition, whether or not we can ever truly know even the people we love. Beautifully written, Armfield’s novel expertly interweaves fairy-tale and horror motifs with a moving and intimate portrayal of loss. The novel tells the story of a woman’s wife who has come back from the sea mysteriously changed. Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under The Sea (2022) is a gorgeous gothic masterpiece. “The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”

Our wives under the sea cover