The world is slowly drowning in ceaseless rains. Cities are crumbling, the sky has gone dark, the government has all but vanished. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes are dealing with the unexpected passing of their estranged father and have found that grief during the slow descent of the end times makes for a strange sort of mourning, made stranger yet by their complex and fractured relationships with each other.

Isla; clinical, unyielding, guarding her desire for emotional connection with her life.
Irene; unpredictable, enabling, caught in the crossfires.
Agnes; the half-sister, vanishing like smoke on a whim and returning only when she pleases.

Against a bleak landscape awash with loss, the sisters reunite in the grand glass house that is largest piece of their father's remaining legacy. As they sift through the estate and the memories that lie within it, they find themselves confronted with the reality of who their father was and how he shaped the women they are.

Already deemed Julie Armfield's "lesbian Lear," "Private Rites" is a sleepy, slow-marching novel of sisterhood set in the end times as water quite literally washes away the earth. As always, Armfield leads with beautiful prose and imagery that few authors do better; but overall, this lacked the unsettling, bewitching quality that rendered "Our Wives Under the Sea" one of my best books of the year. At times, "Private Rites" felt directionless without intention, enormous narrative paragraphs took over pages and pages without much discernible tie-in to the overall story.

While I loved Armfield's use of water throughout, something about his felt unfinished to me, particularly the ending that seemed to come out of nowhere. Undeniably well-written, "Private Rites" isn't the Armfield novel I was expecting and doesn't live up to what its synopsis presents.

A new book by Julia Armfield!? In the words of Taylor Swift: DROP EVERYTHING NOW.

Our Wives Under the Sea was one of my favorite books of 2022 and, hundreds of books later, has remained in my all-time top-10 list. Private Rites has the same eerie, unsettled atmosphere Armfield captures so well - only this time told through even more perspectives, including not only the three sisters but the deteriorating city in which they life. It's reminiscent of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven on multiple levels - the shifting POVs with the occasional interlude from an omniscient narrator, the exquisite sentence-level writing, the haunting speculative concept.

The story takes place in a not-too-distant future in which climate change has led to near-constant rain; much of the city is underwater, buildings are rotting and collapsing, and subway lines and highways have slowly but inexorably given way to boats and water taxis - that is, when there's still any infrastructure at all. The sense of creeping dread is palpable - and especially powerful set against the normalcy with which the city's inhabitants, to various degrees of success, attempt to go about their lives.

In the first sentence of the blurb, Private Rites was framed as a reimagining of King Lear, but that didn't quite fit my experience. Yes, it centers on three sisters reeling from the trauma inflicted by their controlling, withholding, manipulative father ... but I don't think that scenario is limited to Shakespeare! It's certainly a family drama, but the framing set me up to expect a much stronger relationship to the original. (That said, it's probably been 15 years since I read King Lear, so it's entirely possible I missed references.)

I think Armfield did a spectacular job at bringing to life the complex, convoluted relationships at the heart of the story - and, of course, at the atmospheric worldbuilding, depicting a future so eerie and vivid I dreamed about it two nights in a row. But I'm not sure I loved the horror element, nor did I totally get it. (Maybe another Shakespeare / King Lear reference I didn't understand?) I would have preferred more or less - the amount we got struck me as a bit too much buildup for a too-quick payoff. Again based on the blurb, I think I was expecting something more along the lines of Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno Garcia or Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, and it wound up being more subtle - and then more jarring - than both.

Somewhere around 4.5 stars for me, rounded up to 5. I look forward to stocking and shelf-talking this in the bookstore. Thanks to Flatiron and NetGalley for my advance copy.