A story about three sibling sisters, their absentee mother(s) and their fraught relationship with their complicated, overbearing father. The father has now died and the three siblings who have not been in close touch for a while are trying to pick up where they left off in the aftermath of the demise. I was intrigued by the plot and premise of the story however I have to admit that it did not entirely work for me. The writing is fantastic. However, I was not able to connect to the girls and their life stories. The author tries to bring in some element of horror and mystery somewhere towards the end but it was not well-developed and I was left with too many questions. You can give this a try if you are a Julia Armfield fan or you like Shakespeare retellings. This one is loosely based on King Lear.
Thank you Netgalley and Flatiron books for the ARC

a very compelling contempoary retelling of king lear, i think that the final act of this one was most engaging and felt the most "horror." it was a little slow to start and it was difficult to get invested in the characters, but once it got to about the two-thirds mark, things really kicked into high gear and had great intensity.

"Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company."

Private Rites left me with mixed feelings. In one aspect, I love the climate change setting, and Julia Armfield's writing is stunning as always: her reflections on life, queer love and if it's worth being alive in a world that is ending will always resonate with me. However, I couldn't connect with the three main characters, Isla, Irene and Agnes: they felt distant and insubstantial, lacking somehow.

The story is set in a world dealing with a climate crisis for the past 10 years. The water levels keep rising and every city looks like Venice: waterlogged. There are no cars, no airports, people have to use boats, ferries and elevated trains to go from place to place. There are constant energy blackouts, food prices rising, buildings falling apart, people with less money living in dangerous places while the rich live in montains, hills or higher neighborhoods with no risk of flooding. Some jobs don't exist anymore, others, remain.

Our 3 protagonists are the daughters of a famous celebrity architect, and they have to gather together to organize their father's funeral even though they don't get along with each other. Isla has just received her wife's divorce papers, Irene is frustrated with her job and her career in general, and Agnes works at a café and is overall just living alone in an apathetic state, going day by day trying not to do plans, since she sees no perspective of a future in this crumbling world.

The main focus of the novel is the strained relationship between the 3 sisters. Isla is 35-years-old, Irene is 34-years-old and they are both daughters of their father's first wife, Allegra. Agnes is 24-years-old and she's the daughter of their father's second wife, Marie, with whom he cheated his first wife with. Both Isla and Irene blame Marie for their mother's suicide, and in consequence, Agnes as well, since they'll always associate their younger sister with Marie's arrival in their family and their mom's spiraling mental health. Also, the age difference plays its part in making the two older sisters closer, and Agnes, even more apart from them, specially when growing up.

However, even though I like the premisse, my main issue with this book is that I didn't connect with these characters and their problems. Isla's divorce drama bored me, Agnes' nonchalance towards everything and everyone annoyed me, the only sister I liked was Irene but ever her gave me the nerves sometimes, specially when she'd put on a fight for stupid reasons, like a spoiled child.

My second problem with this book is the fact that the author barely explores the theme "religious cults" throughout the novel, even though some important (and mysterious) characters in the story are part of a cult and even though the author decided to make one specific cult important very to the plot in the last 20 pages. We never get to know what were the true intentions of this cult, why were they interested in the sisters, what did their father and Marie had to do with them, how deeply they were mixed with them and why.

Although I struggled with the characters, I enjoyed the overall messages and themes. Private Rites is a book that shares light on themes like how to find reasons to be alive in a crumbling world, how much our behavior can or cannot be blamed on the way we were raised, how the lack of love in a younger age can mess with someone's head, their view of the world and their bonds (or lack of) with other people for years to come.

“At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?”

This book was not necessarily what I was expecting, but I still enjoyed it overall! The last 10% of this book is really made this book for me.

I don’t usually need my books to have a point but this was bugged me that it seemed to built up for something and the something was random and kind of boring.

I fell in love with Julia's first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, and have been itching to read her followup. Gorgeous, brilliant, and so evocative. One of the best new writers to have emerged in the last decade.

Private Rites is an eerie, elegant meditation on grief, sisterhood, and the slow unraveling of a world teetering on the edge. Julia Armfield writes with a hypnotic, salt-soaked lyricism that perfectly suits the novel’s post-climate-collapse setting—where rising tides are not only literal but emotional. The story is intimate and insular, following three sisters living in isolation after the death of their mother, and Armfield captures their shared claustrophobia, tenderness, and quiet unraveling with chilling precision.

The prose is stunning—moody, poetic, and dripping with atmosphere. Armfield doesn’t just describe the sea, she summons it: relentless, creeping, ever-present. The novel feels like it’s written in water—fluid, disorienting, and occasionally overwhelming in its emotional depth. There’s something deeply haunting about the way the story explores inherited trauma and feminine rage, wrapped in gothic trappings and slow-burn dread. It’s not horror in the traditional sense, but there’s a spectral weight to every page.

Some readers might find the pacing languid or the ambiguity challenging, especially if they’re looking for plot-driven fiction—but that’s also what gives Private Rites its unique power. This is a novel that prioritizes mood over motion, internal shifts over external spectacle. It lingers like a half-remembered dream, beautiful and mournful and hard to shake. Armfield has once again proven herself a master of quiet devastation.

I’m disappointed to say Julia Armfield’s writing just isn’t for me. I struggled with Our Wives Under the Sea but still gave Private Rites a chance—and it took me over a month to finish. The worldbuilding was cool, but the pacing was a slog. Then suddenly everything happened all at once in the last 10%, and I wasn’t even sure what was going on. Beautifully written, but not for me.

Julia Armfield didn't disappoint with this new novel! Initially, I was worried about a retelling as it's not normally what I look for in horror novels, but this was beautiful and poetic. A retelling that felt applicable with queerness and climate change. The dystopian setting with the family dynamics really made the novel work for me. I love stories about grief and sisterhood and this one was really well done. Armfield has become an auto-buy author for me.

As an Our Wives Under the Sea evangelist, I was absolutely foaming at the mouth for Private Rites. Great news: This book fucks. It’s gay and eerie and vibey and weird. Above all, It Is Wet (Julia Armfield? Writing a Wet Book? It’s more likely than you think). In a world reshaped by climate change, three somewhat estranged sisters come back together when their very estranged father dies. As they sift through their father’s legacy, they begin to understand that something larger and more malevolent is at work in their family. Drink it up, baby!

I thought the blurb of this book seemed intriguing, however I'd never read a book by Julia Armfield before. This book was not what I was expecting. I was .... a lot. Dense with descriptions that sometimes I skimmed through. A lot of arguing between dysfunctional family member characters that are not likeable. All the while the the world is drowning. This really was not my favorite read.

I've enjoyed Armfield's work in the past however, this story didn't grab my attention as much as their previous work did. I found it a little difficult to stay engaged with the story even though the writing was wonderful. I will definitely continue to look forward to Armfield's future works, though.

I had a hard time with this one. I really enjoyed the setting and explorations of sisterhood and grief, but the « mystery » plot line wasn't well conceived or fully explored and took us off course from what felt like the true heart of the novel.

I did appreciate the exploration of family and the sensation of being cast in amber. Treated as if the person you were at age 14 is the person you are at 24.

« The sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again. »

Poignant and deeply reflective, this novel explores loss, sisterhood, and sorrow in a way that will probably stick with me for a long while, and the last pages delivered all that I had hoped for.

What a strange and wonderous book. Private Rites follows the lives of three sisters, Isla, Irene, and Agnes, after the death of their powerful, brutal architect of a father. All three of them are adults, a bit estranged, and at deeply different stages of their lives. Also, the world is ending. That's a rather large feature. It has been raining for years, water slowly rising, and England left to try and rise with it, and maybe it's just them, but it seems to be getting worse. So the trio contend with their various romantic relationships, dead-end jobs, each other after decades of their father pitting them against each other (and seemingly trying to continue doing so through the inheritance), and the world growing ever stranger and more hostile.
A lot of this book is slow and reflective, the three women trying to come to grips with everything around them. Meditations on how to live in a world that might not keep going, how to love, how to be sisters with people you don't know, if you ever did, and also don't like too much. All three of the sisters are complex in their own ways. Isla, a therapist with a drinking problem, is going through a divorce and flailing professionally. Irene keeps sabotaging her stable relationship and is trying to figure out where to go professionally. Agnes is finally becoming an adult, falling in love for the first time truly. And then, towards the end, the slow moving thing ends and things get super weird super fast. And I loved it.
This is the kind of book that you think about for a while.

I loved Our Wives Under the Sea and salt slow both from the very beginning of the book. Unfortunately this one failed to pull me in fully and I didn’t read the whole thing. I’m not the biggest fan of Shakespeare-based stuff, so I would still recommend this if you like the authors style and the inspiration material. I think there’s a good audience for this book out there, it’s just not me.

This story was such an interesting blend of genres...literary cli-fi dystopian speculative fiction. I loved the character development of all three sisters, each of them with their own set of issues and ways to cope. I'll admit I didn't always know what the heck was happening, but I sure enjoyed the ride!

Julia Armfield's signature haunting and lyrical writing style has returned in this emotional and evocative story. While I didn't quite connect to the story as much as I did her first novel, I enjoyed reconnecting with one of my favorite author's writing and I look forward to her future works.

I think Julia Armfield is one of the most interesting voices in speculative writing. I loved <i>Our Wives Under the Sea</i> and I think <i> Private Rites</i> is such a good follow-up novel. Armfield is great at creating this intense sense of dread throughout the plot. I can understand why some readers are not a fan of the ending of this particular work--it feels a bit rushed compared to the pacing of the first two-thirds of it. However, I really enjoyed it overall and am excited to read whatever comes next.

Thank you, NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

4.5 ⭐️

Julia Armfield is back at it again with sad ocean lesbianism, this time with 100% more apocalypse and x3 times the lesbians.

Private Rites follows three sisters—all lesbians—as they navigate the death of their architect father, the ghosts of their childhood, and their complex relationships with each other and their lovers. Meanwhile, the flood has come; their city is mostly underwater thanks to global warming, and the constant rain only wears the city down more and more. People cram themselves into smaller and smaller spaces, ride boats to get to work, and business close when the rain stops.

I once described Armfield’s previous novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, as quintessential lesbian tragedy, and I would say that Private Rites falls into that category as well, though in this case ‘tragedy’ works in the classical sense as well.

Evidently it is a King Lear retelling, which I didn’t fully know until about 15% in. I haven’t read King Lear, so I am not sure how it compares or what elements the novel pulls—I definitely want to read King Lear and give Private Rites a reread in the future so I can more fully understand how Armfield adapts and comments upon the source material.

I absolutely loved this novel. Armfield’s prose, appropriately, is oceanic—melancholy as an empty sea, wrathful as storm-lashed waters, and able to calm or rough in the blink of an eye. For some reason, Private Rites in particular reminded me a bit of Disco Elysium, in the sense that there is this sad, struggling world impacted by uncontrollable, inevitable disaster caused by human action, and despite this terrible pressure mundanity continues on. (The sections of PR where the city speaks helps this as well, of course. I’m a sucker for a perhaps-sentient city zeitgeist narrator.)

(Non-specific discussion of the ending below, spoilers for Our Wives Under the Sea)
The main aspect of this novel that keeps me from giving a full five stars is the execution of the ending—something which, on reflection, was also present in Our Wives Under the Sea as well. The ending of PR feels very sudden and has a major tonal shift. It does not come out of nowhere, per say—the elements are certainly built and foreshadowed plenty—but there is just something about how extremely suddenly the narrative swerves into an ending that just felt slightly out of place with the rest of the books in terms of pacing and tone. For some reason, to me—despite it having all the same characters and the same setting and the same themes—it feels like the ending to a genre novel, not a literary one.

And don’t get me wrong, I love a genre novel! I’m a huge genre fan! But when the book is a slow character study and the ending is almost an action movie, it just leaves me feeling like “…huh?”

Like I said, this was present in Our Wives Under the Sea as well. We have this grief-filled, wonderfully weird, quiet tragedy of a character study between Miri and Leah, and a beautifully tragic ending of letting Leah go, into the sea. But then there’s also the ending plot point of Miri maybe joining forces with another person who lost a loved one to the sea expedition to investigate and eventually take down this corporation, which feels more like the beginning to a genre sci-fi than the end to a literary novel with sci-fi/horror elements.

I don’t necessarily dislike the ending to either plot-wise. The endings just didn’t have room to breathe or settle, especially in the case of Private Rites—like the narrative realized it only had one more chapter to wrap things up so it had to jam everything into way too small a space. It just felt a little unsatisfying.

I’m already looking forward to the next Armfield book—there are elements I’ve noticed in both her novels so far, both in terms of broad thematics, images, and major/minor plot elements (@ me if you want to talk about the role play forums), and I’m desperate to pattern-seek in whatever she writes next.

Overall this is another win for the weird oceanic lesbian literature lovers !! Julia Armfield thank you for my life !!!!

thank you to the publisher for providing an e-ARC via NetGalley. all opinions expressed in this review are my own.