"Miri's wife, Leah, is a marine biologist who goes on a deep sea research mission and comes back wrong. Something goes awry with the submarine and she is gone for months longer than expected. Miri struggles to understand what happened and to recognize the woman she loves in this quiet figure who barely eats and runs the taps all day. Whatever happened at the bottom of the ocean, some aspect of it has surfaced with Leah, onto shore and into their home.
I knew by the second page that this book was going to be phenomenal, and I knew soon after that I was going to finish it in 2 sittings."
Publisher Flatiron Books
Publication Date 2022-07-12
Section New Hardcover - Fiction
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781250229892
From Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year finalist Julia Armfield, a haunting, utterly original debut novel about a couple dealing with the aftermath of a disastrous deep-sea mission
Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.
By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another. Fathomlessly inventive and original, Julia Armfield’s debut is a portrait of marriage as we’ve never seen it before.
