I have to admit that when I heard of this book, I had no idea what it was about. I saw it in my favourite bookstore (Gay’s the Word in London), and I immediately knew that I wanted it. I didn’t look online to see what it was about; I prefer to be surprised. Of course I heard good things about it, and I was excited to start it. Long story short: it lives up to the hype.
I think the thing that drew me to the book was originally the cover, and then the premise of ‘came back wrong’ that is so prevalent in this book. That particular trope has always intrigued me, and I was excited to see it in a sapphic book.
The story follows Miri and her wife, Leah. Leah, a marine scientist, has recently returned from a disastrous submarine expedition. She was originally supposed to be gone for only three weeks. Something went wrong, and Leah was gone, trapped at the bottom of the ocean, for six months. Miri had given up hope of her wife ever returning, so when the mysterious Centre, Leah’s employer, tells her that Leah has returned, she’s ecstatic at the thought of having her love back with her.
But Leah came back… wrong. Whatever Miri was expecting to find, it was not what greeted her. Leah no longer has any interest in movies, one of their favourite things to do together, and rarely speaks. When she does, her words are always about the sea, while giving nothing away about what happened, and Miri doesn’t want to ask. As the story progresses, we see the extent to which their relationship has changed from the early days of their love story, with small tidbits of information given to us as Miri reminisces on how the two met.
The dual POVs of Miri and Leah tell the story in an artful way which I loved. Julia Armfield switches between the two for the entirety of the book, and we slowly begin to learn more about the couple and what exactly happened to Leah on the expedition.
While Miri’s chapters tell us of the aftermath and the changes she sees in Leah, Leah’s chapters slowly tell us about the way the submarine simply… stopped working, sinking into the ocean before coming to rest on the bottom. Leah and her crew members have no way of knowing what went wrong or how long they’ve been down there, and she tells us how it affects them in such a way that I couldn’t put the book down. I desperately wanted to know what happened.
By the end of the book, I still wasn’t entirely sure what happened. Was it cabin fever? Was it a strange form of evolution which made Leah unable to survive outside of the sea? Or was it something more sinister; she tells us how her crewmate begins to hear a voice down in the dark of the ocean. The not knowing exactly what happened enthralls me, and I truly believe that I will re-read this book in the future.
Our Wives Under the Sea is unlike any horror book I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot). It is both a horror and a love story, the ending bittersweet as Miri releases Leah back into the sea. The book made me laugh as Miri tells us of the early days of their relationship, and made me cry as she realised that saving – or fixing – Leah, was an impossible task.
Ultimately, this is a book I’m happy I bought, and has secured it’s place as my first 5 star read of 2024. I highly recommend picking up a copy of this masterpiece.
Buy it here:
The Tay Smith Effect 