Our Wives Under The Sea Winner of the Polari Prize, a hypnotic, otherworldly love story

With this book, Julia Armfield created the perfect mix of a horror story and a love story. In a two-person pov we read about two wives, one on a deep-sea mission, the other waiting for her to come back home. Armfield's writing style and her way of expressing the emotions and horrors both wives experience is truly beautiful and creepy at the same time.

"Our wives under the Sea" is a very unsettling book and so interesting at the same time. The themes of love and grief combined with the haunting imagery are absolutely breath taking. If I could recommend a queer horror book to people this one would be really high on my list.

This book is a unique love story about loss and the mundanity of drifting apart. It is separated into two parts: Leahs harrowing experience of losing power in a submarine while fully submerged in the ocean is intermittently told alongside the aftermath of that trauma, and how her wife Miri struggles to understand and support her traumatized wife. The story is packed full of beautiful imagery of the sea – haunting and powerful. I was gripped by the writing from start to finish. This book does get a bit weird toward the end, which I enjoyed, since it was a fascinating, fresh way to finish this otherwise very raw and real tale.

Our Wives Under The Sea is a beautifully written, but melancholic and eerily haunting character study, which uses magical realism to explore the topics of human relationships, trauma, grief and losing someone you love when you no longer recognize the person they've become. It has some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read; very intense and vivid, while being both unsettling and tender, which evokes this feeling of helplessness, emptiness and isolation.

When Leah, a deep-sea researcher, magically returns from her mission after going missing in the ocean for 6 months, her wife Miri is overcome with joy and relief. However, the jubilation that comes with the knowledge that her wife survived the unimaginable is quickly overshadowed by a sense of oddity and dread. Miri realizes something is seriously wrong with Leah—something that does not only cause her to deteriorate physically but mentally as well. This change, and whatever it is driven by, is slowly but surely tearing Miri and Leah's marriage apart, and Miri does for the life of her not know how to help the woman she loves so fiercely, how to aid her in finding back to the version of herself that seemingly still resides in the deep darkness of the ocean. ''Our Wives Under The Sea'' is a hauntingly beautiful book that immediately creates a suffocating atmosphere shaped by uneasiness and trepidation. The alternating point of view that allows the reader to experience the events from both women's perspectives results in a sense of suspense that leaves you on the edge of your seat throughout the entirety of the book. Julia Armfield created a story that is so eerily haunting while simultaneously being tragically heartbreaking that even the creepiest elements of it, like the body horror, are often softened by the sheer love Miri has for Leah. A love that remains steadfast even to the very end.