Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.
Reviewed: Thursday January 18, 2024.

Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. When her wife returns after a catastrophic deep sea mission, Miri is thrilled to think she might have her back, but increasingly it becomes clearer and clearer that something happened to Leah in the dark and the cold, and that perhaps the Leah that now haunts the flat they once shared is no longer the Leah that was.

Four stars.

I went into this book not expecting much. I’d heard about it through a video on Instagram, I think, which is not always the best place to get book reviews. I went into it expecting something silly and shallow (get it?), and definitely a lot more horror-focused than it ended up being. However, “Our Wives Under the Sea” beat every expectation by a mile, and quickly became a contender for one of my favourite books of 2024, so early in the year.

OWUtS presents a slow and ambling mediation on grief and loss, and the ways in which people can be both there and absent all at once. The story of Miri and Leah’s quiet present is spliced with anecdotes of their love story, and the alternation between the loud joy of their first dates to Miri’s bitterness towards the woman she loves is jarring and good to chew on.

I loved the prose style Armfield chose to write this book in, and I loved, too, the alternation between Miri and Leah’s chapters, below and above water. This book leaves all your questions unanswered in a way that is deeply satisfying - this is not a book about horror, or strange marine institutions, or whatever lurks there in the deep where no one goes. It is a story about love and loss, and the strange, aching ways that grief yawns in the chest when nothing tanglible has been lost.