Our Wives Under the Sea

When Leah finally returns from a deep-sea mission that went catastrophically wrong — a routine dive that stretched into months trapped at the bottom of the ocean — she is not the woman her wife Miri remembers. Something followed Leah up from the deep, or something in the deep followed her home, and slowly, quietly, Leah is changing, her body beginning to give way as though the sea is reclaiming her.

Alternating between Miri's grief-stricken present and Leah's account of what happened below, Julia Armfield's debut novel is a haunting, oceanic story of love and loss — part literary horror, part elegy — about what it means to hold on to someone as they slip beyond your reach.