I didn't expect to blast through this as fast as I did! And the only reason I didn't finish the audiobook in one night is that I had responsibilities in the morning.

How is a relationship changed by trauma? Miri is doing her best to keep their lives running after her wife, Leah, returns from being lost under the sea for six months. It's expected that Leah would come back changed, being stuck in a submarine with two other people for so long, when their trip was only expected to last a few weeks. Perhaps Leah could change in a way that Miri couldn't even grow into or cope with. But what begins as the strangeness of shock and a return to the world of the living grows into something more sinister, more unnatural.

There's a few smaller sections where we get narration from Leah, and here we learn what really happened under the sea, but it's Miri's thoughts that define this book. She tells us about their courtship and early married life, and their hopes for the future, in a very "middle-aged memoir" sort of tone, which is a great juxtaposition with what lies underneath.

The ending is beautiful, in a really arthouse film sense. I could see this being adapted into a little 30-minute film and sweeping all the film festivals. The story of a lesbian couple, the sea, and unknowable horror? That's a win!

Advanced review copy provided by the publisher.

Haunting and lyrical, I think this story will stay with me like a song that resurfaces from the depths of memory, becoming a narrative touchstone.

The two narrators tell disparate yet intertwining stories. Leah is a scientist who has embarked on a deep-sea exploration. Miri is her wife, anxiously awaiting her return like the mariner's wife in the old adventure tales. Except this time, we are privy to desperation and delayed frustration of waiting. Both women yearn to return to each other, but returns are always different from what we expect.

thank you Net Galley for an audio copy of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julie Armfield. I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn't.

When Miri's wife comes back from a horrific accident at the bottom of the ocean, she's different. She oozes, she lies in water, and she doesn't respond the same. Told in back and forth tales from Miri after Leah returns and Leah during the accident, the reader slowly realizes that the horror the couple is facing is more than just PTSD.

Watching the love story between these two unwind was an amazing study of grief and love. It was fascinating and gut wrenching. It was also beautifully written. I'm still not entirely sure of what happened though, not to the submarine, or what happened to Leah after she returned to the surface. But following the story was still something I want to reread and see if it makes any more sense the second time around.

I loved the details and how realistic they were, learning about Miri's slow descent into the horror of realizing her wife was not coming home, only for her to return so changed she wonders if it would have been better if she'd never returned at all.

I very much plan to buy this books and reread it, it was so ensnaring and intriguing. I have to know what happened at the bottom of the ocean...

Our Wives Under the Sea is both a book full of lovely prose and a disconcerting story. The story revolves around Miri and Leah and the tumult they go through after Leah returns from a research mission on a submarine that was supposed to last three weeks and ended up lasting six months. The grief and anger in Miri’s chapters are palpable and sometimes hard to listen to. I was very much drawn in to Leah’s chapters, waiting to hear what happened on the submarine mission amid a growing dread about what The Center did to the three people involved. The narrator was fantastic in relaying the grief and dread throughout. Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the early listen.

Our Wives Under the Sea is a story about grief, loss, processing, and, of course, unsettling scary shit. The prose is lyrical in a way that begs to be quoted. There are layers and layers of meaning and symbolism that the literature major in me still appreciated mentally combing through. If I was the kind of person that really loved when a book made me sad and depressed - I think this one would become a favorite. And part of me loves it still - even though I also despise it for not giving me closure or any hope of happiness at the end.

My favorite parts were the way Miri and Leah's love for each other is portrayed throughout the book - how they thought of each other when apart, how they remembered/described the happiness of their relationship. Which is probably a large part of why I felt this was a fairly devastating novel to read.

While this book was not my usual kind of book (I'm very much looking forward to retreating into a book that is a lot happier), I cannot deny that it was well written and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that loves a horror-story/literary fiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for providing me an audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My review was posted on goodreads and can be found here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4802155294

Our Wives Under the Sea is a great suspenseful story. It's a duel perspective between two married women and the way the author transitions between the narratives is really well done. I like how the writing sets a grey and depressing sense of dread throughout the story. If I had one critique it'd be that i found myself wanting to know more about the actual creature under the sea and that the answers we got were more clear and less open-ended.

4 stars

The premise of Armfield's debut novel grabbed me, but the real surprise is how relatable such an unusual set of circumstances can feel. I expect that many readers will walk away with - similarly - much more personal relevance than they were expecting.

Miri and Leah share perspectives, a marriage, past memories of their relationship, and especially the joint processing of a truly unusual circumstance. Leah's journey to the depths of the sea provides some really solid deep sea/deep space what-the-heck-happened-out-there vibes to both readers and to her wife. She's gone for much longer than anticipated, and when she returns, her behaviors and even her physical body demonstrate that she has...changed. These changes become a central part of both characters' lives and - by default - relationship. For Miri, Leah's experiences prompt a lot of reminiscing, and these are some of my favorite moments. She fantasizes about earlier aspects of their relationship when - though things might not have been perfect - they were much closer versus where they stand now. Miri also has a lot of processing to do. She is literally watching her wife disintegrate, and the sense of loss is both literal and symbolic. Though Leah's thoughts were not as gripping for me (they come with some intentional veiling and focus on the deep), what happens to her body is really something. As is the case when any partner experiences a trauma, rupture, etc., managing the new way of being and who they are now/will be becomes the new normal.

For me, the strongest feature of this novel is the richness of the symbolism. I expect that some readers will find this off-putting; this book FEELS like *literature* and without some of the skills/work to dig into the layers, I can see how some readers would find the plot/development lacking. BUT, readers who organically want to plumb the depths (like Leah!) will have a field day here. The particular situation is unusual, but the references to changing relationships, trauma, loss, aging, mental health, and so much more can be related easily to any more typical connection that readers may have encountered themselves. In that way, this piece will offer an invaluable mirror to many.

This novel is both subtle and over-the-top, original and relatable, and unquestionably surprising in its low-key but palatable didacticism. It's an intriguing read for a specific audience, and so I'll be recommending this one highly to a targeted group. Oh, and this author will be on my to-read no matter what list going forward.

One last note about the format: I started this book on my Kindle and switched to the audio for about the last 90%. I highly recommend the audio version when/where available. The narrators add so much.

“I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.”

OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA is an atmospheric, multilayered novel about grief, love, and the fine line between real life and the creatures that haunt our depths. The story is told from two perspectives: Leah, recounting her recent undersea research expedition that lasted far longer than planned after their submarine lost communications and all other functionality other than basic life support, and Miri, her wife, dealing with the aftermath of Leah’s journey when she arrives home part-sea creature, subtly, eerily, and irrevocably changed.

This story is haunted, haunting, feeling initially a bit like a modern-day fable and by the end, a horrifying, grief-stricken fever dream. It’s a strange and compelling meld of genres, like Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead meets Wilder Girls meets Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, anxious queer millennial literary fiction meshed with body horror and a mysterious journey to the depths of the ocean, while somehow also containing one of the most epic and ordinary of tragic love stories.

The writing is fascinating and beautiful, immersing us in the world of a deep sea explorer and carrying that imagery into all aspects of the novel. Leah and Miri’s relationship, while undoubtedly at the core of the story, seems to lurk beneath the surface at first, coming more clearly into focus as the story progresses and you see the depths and details of their love for each other. Armfield contrasts the monotonies of life - the bills that come, the sounds of your neighbors’ television, the dishes that accumulate, the hold music cycling back on itself, the throbbing of a toothache - with the sharp realization that something has changed with the person you once knew so well, that nothing will ever be as it was again. There is a strong feeling of powerlessness, of helplessness, allowing yourself to be submerged beneath forces both weighty and banal, slipping into a mist that obscures, dulls, diminishes your senses, which pulls at the reader from both Leah and Miri’s perspectives.

I can see this novel as an extended allegory for a rupture in a relationship, where one partner has experienced something traumatic or fallen in love with someone else or gone on some other kind of emotional journey while the other partner is left on the outside, unable to truly understand what their partner has experienced, lamenting the loss of the everyday joys and conflicts the couple uses to share. Or perhaps where one partner is sick or dying, and the other is struggling with how to grieve while caring for them. There’s a definite parallel between Miri’s slow loss of her mother to illness before her death and the way Leah slips away from her: incrementally, confusingly, leaving Miri alone to figure out how to mourn while Leah is still physically with her but otherwise gone. This is another way in which this is a remarkable book: it’s such a singular, incredible story, with a multitude of universal human experiences contained within.

It’s a strange and gorgeous and unsettling novel, by turns existential and creepy, romantic and heart-wrenching, and I really, deeply loved it - more than that, I felt it. Thank you to Flatiron Books and Dreamscape Media for the review copies! The audiobook, narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway, is lovely. This book comes out in July.

Content warnings: death of a parent/loved one, terminal illness, some gore/body horror

Our Wives Under the Sea is probably my favorite book I’ve read this year. It’s so beautifully written, I was pulled in right from the start. This book had me laughing and crying. I love that the book was told from both Miri and Leah’s perspectives and we could see both sides of their relationship. I honestly hated all of the deep sea talk, but it was also really interesting! (I just hate the ocean) I’ve already read the book, so I really enjoyed being able to listen to the audiobook. Listening to the book made everything a little more unsettling! I can’t wait for this book to come out so I can share it with everyone!