Our Wives Under The Sea Titelbild

Our Wives Under The Sea

Winner of the Polari Prize, a hypnotic, otherworldly love story

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Our Wives Under The Sea

Von: Julia Armfield
Gesprochen von: Annabel Baldwin, Robyn Holdaway
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Über diesen Titel

Winner of the Polari Prize
Shortlisted for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize

‘A gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness’ – Florence Welch

Our Wives Under The Sea is the haunting novel from Julia Armfiled, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep, deep sea.

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. But it soon becomes clear that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose. Living in the same space but suddenly separate, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had might be gone.

'A wonderful novel, deeply romantic and fabulously strange' – Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith

'Part bruisingly tender love story, part nerve-clanging submarine thriller' – The Times

 Belletristik Genre-Fiction Horror Literatur & Belletristik Romanze

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Kritikerstimmen

This haunting novel is beautifully written and artfully narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway...Thanks to fine performances, Leah's diary entries, Miri's flashbacks, and the unimaginable mystery of the deep ocean all seem real. Listeners won't want to miss this genre-bending love story. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2022
Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers, Our Wives Under The Sea moves fluidly between horror story and love story, the gorgeous and the grotesque. A contemporary gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness (Florence Welch)
A wonderful novel, deeply romantic and fabulously strange. I loved this book (Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith)
Tender, strange, lucid, and so assured – comparisons feel insubstantial, but if you love sci fi or love stories or books that defy labels or chew-your-arm-off good writing, this is for you (Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies and The Dance Tree)
Beautiful, otherworldly, like floating through water with your eyes open (Daisy Johnson, author of Fen)
Our Wives is spooky and romantic: a gorgeous, lyrical novel that gets under your skin. Armfield leads you softly through a story that feels epic and intimate at the same time (Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark)
Reading this book is like diving into the deepest depths of the ocean and finding beautiful and disturbing wonders (Kirsty Logan, author of She is Witch)
Delicate and horrifying, Our Wives Under The Sea is a darkly brilliant novel that submerges the reader's imagination in the depths of the unknown (Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From)
A mesmerizing triumph. Julia Armfield has created a surprisingly seamless novel: it is a love story, a grief story, a question without end. It's a tale of the sea that swallows you whole and breaks your heart in the very best way. It is tender and funny. It is shockingly bold. Without a doubt, it is one of the best books I've ever read. It's not only art, it's a perfect miracle. We are lucky for it (Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things)
As in her stories, Armfield is extremely good at anatomising the women’s relationship: the self-defensive blindnesses, the resentments and rituals and angers, grief for vanished joys – all the small moments of which lasting love consists. There are clever lines, everywhere, and wry, funny ones
Sharp, atmospheric, dryly funny, sad, distinctive . . . There is an almost spiritual endlessness to its quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep and then deeper again
Alle Sterne
Am relevantesten
Deep sea stories always get me, this one was horrific and sad but poetically beautiful. Pretty vague story but I found it still gripping. The love story bits and characterisations were relatable and moving to me.

"In my head I think I'm often telling Miri stories. Locking away information or things I've seen in order to tell her about them later. Even trapped as I was down there, I was still doing this. Taking everything in with one eye on how to recount it. I think I've trained myself to look at things this way, as if for her as well as me.
Although now, writing this, I'm not sure I really want her to know about it. I can't say whether this is a story I actually want to tell."
- chapter 22

Gripping and haunting

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What a ride! The book reads like what I imagine an Andrea Arnold and early David Lynch collaboration might be like.
It’s slow and suspenseful, kitchensink tragedy meets Jules Verne like horror remix. I dig it.

Also: what a fantastic casting of the narrator. Great quality audio and a delightful voice.

Great Storytelling, spectacular narrator

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Armfield can really write a beautiful, poetic sentence. The speaker is wonderful and clearly loves the text. It left very happy, even though the story is so sad.

Wonderful book about grief snd love

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Ich hab mich super auf dieses Hörbuch gefreut, da es mir empfohlen wurde, aber leider hat es mich gar nicht überzeugt.
Die interessanten und spannenden Teile des Buches enden alle auf einem Cliffhanger. Nichts wird in Detail betrachtet oder erklärt. Der Hauptcharakter, Miri, ist sehr repetitiv und hat mich absolut gelangweilt. Das Buch hat zwar etwas Atmosphäre aber keinen Inhalt.
Hinzu kommt, dass die beiden Sprecherinnen sehr monoton sind und nicht viel zur Spannung beitragen.

Leider etwas langweilig

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This story is told by Miri and Leah; Leah, who went on a deep sea exploration mission and returned far too late and strangely different, and Miri, who stayed behind and now deals with a wife she cannot recognize.

The first half, if not 60% of the book, is dedicated to setup. Their relationship. Miri's friend Carmen, whom she doesn't actually like or respect. Leah's friends that also become Miri's friends, whom Miri completely fails to include in the unfolding tragedy. Miri's relationship to her mother, which can be described as "restrained", at best. All this to say, for over half of the book, nothing happens.

It is Miri that I was growing ever more annoyed with. There are a great many things she observes, but she does absolutely nothing. The most galling aspect of her inactivity is her failure to communicate. I recognize that the "lone wolf" protagonist is a popular (and wildly overused) trope, but here its use was especially grating because we are in Miri's head a lot, and she keeps telling us, the readers, that she could have said something but didn't. Oh, all the times she just didn't. Didn't say, didn't do, didn't want to actually know, it was so incredibly tedious.

When the book picks up the pace and stuff starts happening, it is actually quite interesting, which makes the whole thing all the more frustrating, because it allows me to imagine all the things this novel could have been, but wasn't. Imagine, if Miri had been an active participant in the story! What things we could have could have found out! Some will say that this novel, in eschewing the obvious route - that of an actual horror novel - went to a much more profound place (see what I did there?). To those people, I say, that may be so, but then don't mislabel stuff.

I think that the problem here is the false promise of the genre. This was labeled as "Horror", so I expected horror, but what I got was mild trepidation at best. This is not a horror novel. This is a novel about a relationship, and the whole story about the deep sea exploration turned out to be completely irrelevant. Its effects were used as metaphors, and any number of other incidents, even mundane, terrestrial ones, could have served the same purpose. All the elements that would have made this story Horror were never actually investigated or explored.

ALL THE ELEMENTS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE THIS AN ACTUAL HORROR STORY WERE COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT, and I will die mad about it.

Leah's part of the story was interesting. But since, in the end, it doesn't go anywhere, I might as well have skipped it entirely.

I started writing this review with three stars, but now, upon reflection of how much of a disappointment this was, I am giving it a very benevolent rating of two stars, simply because it wasn't the worst thing I've ever read.

Horribly Disappointing

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