Book Review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

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“To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half hidden.”

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When Miri’s wife, Leah, returns home following a catastrophic deep-sea mission, it’s painfully clear she isn’t the same person. What was supposed to be a weeks-long undertaking turned into months, and she begins changing, appearing to have brought something back from the water. Is her transformation temporary, and can they recapture a sense of normalcy, the life and relationship they once had, or will Leah continue to slip away?

Our Wives Under the Sea unfolds via alternating settings, timelines, and points of view, giving an inside look into what happened to Leah and her mission mates during their time stranded on the ocean floor (“then”), as well as Miri’s experience after Leah’s homecoming (“now”). The writing is gorgeous, enveloping the reader in the tense, hazy, fever-dream-like feeling of the couple’s liminal existence. They’re free yet entirely trapped, at the mercy of developments both terrifying and devastating, producing a searing meditation on love, loss, and grief.

No living thing is in control; we aren’t meant to see the vast unknown, nor can we circumvent it or understand it: it just is. Memories are beautiful hauntings, anchors in the blackness between what was and what is, lights amid existential darkness and uncertainty. It’s painful and difficult, ruinous and freeing, a story of return and release, observation and inevitability, endurance and transition, and, ultimately, a resonant reflection on the human condition.

🖤Amanda

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