Haunting and absolutely lyrical, OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA was one of my most anticipated releases of 2022 -- and I'm beyond thrilled to say it did NOT disappoint! For such a slim whisper of a novel, its brief pages packed a punch and even now, four months after having read it, my mind still goes back to these characters.

I would have loved to have seen a bit more horror, but what an absolute delight this was and I can't wait to read more of Armfield's work!

<B>I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review</b>: First, read this:
<blockquote>The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.
–and–
I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.
–and–
Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be.</blockquote>
Don't think for a moment that this is ever an easy book to read. It's not long, only 240pp, or probably 85,000 to 90,000 words. It's a supremely effective exercise in lovely phrase-making that adds up to an eerie atmospheric story of two women in a marriage based on so many broken places and invisibly tiny hooks on long, thin, almost undetectable filaments that intertwine with the other's reaching filaments...no telling whose reach in, whose reach out, the effect still mimics velcro for the soul.
<blockquote>I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.</blockquote>
I felt my impatience with Miri, the wife on land, wax and wane several times during the read...in life I'd find Miri intolerable...and I found Leah more and more relatable, as the quote above could've been ripped out of my mind and prettied up some to be Leah's voice. I understood these two women being together, and I understood why Author Armfield introduced a new Leah-like character to be active for Miri the passive, the sea-like all-absorbing heatless Miri. I understood...but I didn't love.

Too much of what happened reminded me of Jeff VanderMeer's <I>Annihilation</i>, possibly more the filmed version than the book. Too many things left off, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnzhPprVVU">dangling conversations</a> like the one in the ancient Simon & Garfunkel song. The eerieness of it is very close to ennui at times, Leah speaks of exhaustion that feels bottomless and that unfortunately is what I took away from this read.

But oh my goddesses, the beautiful phrases. The beautiful, beautiful phrases, the concepts caught in their gem facets, oh my goddesses. Give me that all day long. I promise I won't complain a peep about the "plot".

This was such a unique book! I have not ever read anything quite like this book before. It is beautifully written, a bit slow, thoughtful, and also sad. It is a book that I will remember for a long time as it really made me think.

[2 Stars]

This was one of my most anticipated reads, but unfortunately, it really let me down. The first half was quite gripping and I loved every minute. But then the monotonous pacing and repetitive plot just became really boring. I can see how some could love this (and clearly people have), but it just wasn't for me, personally

"Our Wives Under the Sea" by Julia Armfield is a story about love, grief, and loss!

Miri's marine biologist wife, Leah, is finally coming home after six months at sea. A submariner exploratory mission that should have taken three weeks, ends in a mysterious disaster without meaningful communication from the 'Centre' for months. Miri still has questions that remain unanswered by Leah's employer.

Miri and Leah live together in the same flat but in different spaces now. Miri eats alone in the kitchen and sleeps alone in the spare bedroom. Leah spends a great deal of time locked in the bathroom running water from both taps. She doesn't eat but craves copious amounts of salted water.

Miri notices the differences in Leah. She sees Leah doing these alarmingly odd things and how her body is physically changing. Leah seems to be fading away. Is Miri different now, too?

I will say, and I'm sure about this, I have not ever read anything quite like this book before. It's beautifully written, oddly slow, a bit repetitive, thoughtful, and deeply sad. It's the kind of book that causes you to dig deep within and continue to think about it for a long time afterwards.

The alternating chapters tell the story via the first-person voices of both Miri and Leah. The story travels back into the memories of their relationship, with snippets of what happens under the sea, mingled with the current timeline once Leah is back home.

I read the digital copy and listened to the audiobook choosing to switch back and forth between the two short formats. The audiobook has two narrators, Annabel Baldwin & Robyn Holdaway, which gives each of the main character's a unique voice. I believe this is what gives listening a more emotional experience. With the digital copy, the visual experience of reading the printed word is an experience I will always find comforting!

I enjoy reading books that are different and this creative and beautifully writing debut novel hits that mark for me. It's a story that I continue to think about and dissect over and over again. Like Leah, it keeps changing. It's that kind of story for me. I highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, Dreamscape Media and Julia Armfield for a free ARC and ALC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.

Every review of this book makes note of how devastating and beautiful it is -- for good reason! What a strange, captivating, inventive portrait of grief and marriage and illness. It feels particularly poignant and painful to read during these long COVID years--Leah's slow deterioration and Miri's increasingly desperate attempts to hold onto something and someone that is forever escaping her grasp... What a doozy of a novel!

This novel starts with visceral imagery—cracked molars, missing teeth, nosebleeds, blood seeping out of pores—and maintains the sinister energy all the way to the end.

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

Miri’s wife, Leah, has returned from an exploratory submarine mission, but has she really? She’s home, yet something isn’t quite right, and it only gets worse as time goes on. She spends her days running the faucets in the house they share, staring into space, slow to answer when spoken to. She has started mixing salt into the water she drinks. She isn’t the same person she was when she left.

“I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.”

The story is told in alternating point-of-view chapters, back and forth between Miri’s present-day experience with her returned wife-but-not-quite and Leah’s months-ago journey into the sea. We follow Miri as she tries to contact the research center that sponsored Leah’s mission, hoping for answers about what happened and why Leah’s return was so delayed. And we sink to the bottom of the ocean with Leah as her submarine loses power.

All the while, we watch the relationship between these two women changing and disintegrating, the distance between them ever growing as their ability to communicate breaks down.

“My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.”

Julia Armfield’s writing is spare and haunting. I finished this novel heartbroken, unmoored, terrified, and certain that it will be a favorite of this year.

This is a story about the strength and limits of connection.  Leah is a marine biologist who is sent on what was supposed to be a routine submarine expedition.  Neither Leah, experienced on these types of missions, nor her wife, Miri, think much of this latest work trip.  But something went wrong with the expedition and Leah's submarine sinks to the bottom of the ocean, leaving Miri and her two crew mates stuck without any way of communicating with the outside world.  

When Leah finally returns home, Miri knows something is wrong.  Leah is different.  She barely communicates, rotating between the bedroom and bathroom most days, running the taps all day long, and spending much of her time submerged in a bath.  Miri is desperate for the old Leah to return and, while she waits, to find answers to what happened while Leah was below the sea.  As Miri tries everything she can -- searching her memory for clues from what little she knows about Leah's employer and her coworkers, connecting via the Internet with others who have had a loved one lost or come back from an expedition seemingly different, reflecting on lessons from her relationship with her mother, and seeking answers from those who sent Leah below the seas -- she must confront that the Leah she knew may be slipping away forever.

This is a compelling and quite interesting book.  It alternates between the perspectives of Miri in the present day and Leah as she prepared for and then went on the expedition.  Through both their points of view, we, over time, see the way Miri and Leah's relationship developed, the different perspectives they had on how they came together and their life together, and how they each responded to the challenges of separation and uncertainty.  The author excels at creating an underlying sense of dread and using that to propel the narrative.  The story also succeeds at something that is quite difficult -- portraying both the limits in how well we can know even those we are closest to, while also showing how that does not interfere with us nevertheless fighting for connection to those same people.

Highly recommended!

“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”

Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea opens with an image of a haunted house, and we soon realize that both the deep sea and a house can be full of ghosts, grief and unknown horror. The novel, a blend of sci-fi, horror, psychological thriller and queer marriage drama, is told in alternating chapters by two women: Leah, who was trapped at the bottom of the ocean during a marine research expedition gone wrong; and her wife Miri, who believes Leah is dead until her unexpected return six months later. When Leah comes back, her mind and body have been forever altered by what happened at the bottom of the ocean, and Miri struggles to understand Leah’s absence, transformation and how their relationship has changed.

There is psychological horror under the sea and body horror back on land as Leah’s body slowly morphs into a different state. Miri grieves while her wife is lost at sea, but even when Leah is found, Miri experiences a different kind of loss. In subtle ways, the novel explores mourning, memory and the limits of language, inertia and change, queerness and femininity as the plot begins to blur boundaries between what’s above and below, darkness and light, woman and monster.

Our Wives Under the Sea is strange, disquieting and haunting. There’s not a lot of detail and yet the novel feels tense, vivid, unsettling and filled with dread. The writing is lyrical and compelling, but also claustrophobic and murky in all senses of the word. The plot might be unfolding too slowly for some readers and the vagueness might not work for everyone, but the writing reminded me of the best of Samanta Schweblin, Jeff VanderMeer, Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch.

Memorable, eerie and haunting. An impressive debut!

Many thanks to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for a review.

This is an interesting book to read, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. The book is told in 2 voices, a married couple Leah and Miri. Leah talks solely of the past in which she was part of a submarine research project. Miri talks of the present, of what happened after Leah came back. The two points of view don't really relate to each other at all. Miri wasn't present for any of the project. Leah does not offer any story or commentary on her return. I had more questions at the end of the book than at the beginning.

I had high expectations for this book that unfortunately weren't met. It might have been my misunderstanding of what type of book this was. I was going in expecting a sort of literary thriller/paranormal horror situation, told through the story of two married women and their relationship. Technically, I think that's what this was. However, if I was describing this to a patron, I'd focus a lot more on the marriage/relationship aspect of the novel than the horror. Ultimately I found Miri's sections to be too slow and detached, and I always found myself wondering what was going on in Leah's mind (much as Miri does). I would have liked more of those questions to be answered. I found Leah's sections from the submarine to be the most compelling, and the ultimate "answer" to what's been happening to the crew was so intriguing, I really wanted more. The prose was so spare and detached that I had a hard time connecting to the characters and caring what happened to them. Maybe the dual timeline didn't work for me. There were many individual sentences and passages that worked really well on a writing level, but the overall narrative was just not compelling for me. That being said, Armfield is obviously a talented writer, I just wanted more warmth and passion to shine through in the characters' relationship to one another.

"Our Wives Under the Sea" by Julia Armfield is gorgeously written, haunting, and mysterious. It's the character-driven story of a woman who comes back changed from a research mission on a submarine to the deepest depths of the ocean and the wife she left behind on the surface. Few authors can match Ms. Armfield's talent with language; the atmosphere she creates is weighty, claustrophobic, and deep, almost like being trapped under the ocean as Leah was.

Readers who enjoy fast-paced, plot-driven books will most likely find "Our Wives Under the Sea" to be slow and uneventful, perhaps even boring. But if readers slow down and let the beautiful prose wash over them like the tide, readers will find themselves immersed in the depths of a novel that can only be described as extraordinary.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the privilege of reading an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This was an unusual book for me. Told in two parts, Our Wives is the story of Miri and Leah. Miri narrates their lives before and after Leah’s catastrophic undersea exploration. Leah tells us what happened in the submarine. Simultaneously, it is the story of hope, love, fear, loss, and grief.

When Leah leaves with her crew for a three week expedition to study the ocean, Miri carries on as usual. However, when Leah does not return as scheduled, no one will answer Miri’s questions nor shed any light on what happened. Upon her return it is obvious that Leah is not okay. With no help from anyone, Miri does the best she can to take care of her wife until she begins to understand that their lives will never be the same.

Our Wives is a simple, quick read, but a story that will stay with you long after the book is closed.

3.5

I wanted to enjoy this more than I did and I think this story is just much more quiet than I expected it to be. Much more melancholy than creepy, Our Wives Under the Sea feels more like a metaphor for a breakdown of a relationship than anything else. The longer Leah is back in the apartment she shares with Miri, the more they drift apart from one another, including sleeping separately and talking less.

As the story progresses, Miri’s concern for Leah’s change in behavior turns into irritation. Miri begins to view Leah’s return as an invasion of space and as a reader, it becomes apparent that Miri mourns the idea of the relationship more than she mourns for Leah herself.

Because the story is told in dual perspectives, with Leah’s chapters describing her descent into the sea, I thought there’d be much more insight into why Leah changed following her return to the surface. Even by the end, the findings of the expedition are kept vague and I was left with more questions than answers.

Thanks so much to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for review. The US release of Our Wives Under the Sea is today!

**Many thanks to NetGalley, Flatiron, and Julia Armfield for an ARC of this book!**

That's where I belong
And you belong with me
Not swallowed in the sea - Coldplay

Strange and lyrical, confusing and haunting, this is an interesting look at love, loss, and unexplained change with a bit of Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water tossed in for good measure!

Leah and Miri are in love, but circumstances have thrown a wrench into their relationship. Leah is an underwater explorer, and her last expedition via submarine working as an employee for the Centre went terribly wrong. She was gone for a whopping SIX months. When she returns, Miri notices stark and alarming changes...Leah constantly runs taps in the house. and has a need for salt water in and around her. Blood leaks from her gums, and her skin takes on an odd sheen. The divide between these two women widens, and although Miri searches on her own for more information on what REALLY transpired during this unusual expedition, she feels the woman she once loved fading away, possibly becoming something else entirely. Is it possible for Miri to reclaim what she once had...or has Leah given her mind, body, and soul irrevocably to the sea?

This is an interesting book on a number of levels. It's a bit of a genre bender, with the obvious romance, a heavy dose of sci-fi/horror, and some drama and even non-fiction-esque writing about oceans thrown in. I figured this would be a quick read due to the page count, but it did take me a little bit longer than I'd guessed to get through it. At first, I was caught up in Armfield's lovely prose, which was haunting and eerie, and figured that would carry me through till the end.

However, as the book wore on, all of the strange happenings to Leah were sort of reiterated over and over to the point where it felt unnecessary to keep mentioning them. We get that she constantly needs the salt water...but WHY? After a while, in this sort of book, you want some sort of answers, but this book is more like one long unexplained mystery. The writing is strong and held my attention for quite a while and I thought I was going to rate this one higher than I decided I could by the end...but basically, I just wanted MORE!

We got so many glimpses into Leah and Miri's past relationship, Leah's time trapped on the sub with her colleagues, and of course their current situation, but nothing CONCRETE. I don't want to say too much as to not spoil potential theories, but although this story is beautiful crafted in many respects and evocative, there was so much room for expansion. Which of course makes sense, given the length of the book...but based on the content that WAS there, I tend to think the author probably would have cycled back over some of her themes and ideas without truly going the extra mile to make everything come together in a cohesive way if the book had been longer.

While this book does vary dramatically from del Toro's Shape of Water in certain respects, I do think fans of that book would connect to this one, and I will be looking for Armfield's next work. I hope that NEXT time, however, the answers and conclusions I'm seeking won't feel so much like buried treasure, lost at sea.

3.5 stars

Our Wives Under the Sea is a stunning queer novel about grief and love and horror. Armfield writes the story of a marriage, a wife returned from sea, and the strangeness that comes between them.

It is compact, beautiful, terrifying, and heartbreaking.

Leah was supposed to be gone for two weeks and was instead lost at the bottom of the sea for months. Miri is happy to have Leah back, but begins to believe Leah wasn’t really returned to her.
The story unfolds elegantly through both Miri and Leah’s perspectives.
The prose is mesmerizing as is the exploration of grief and horror.

Along with my list of books read, I keep a list of particularly excellent quotes from those books, insights or particularly poetic turns of phrase that I know I’ll want to revisit. I don’t record things from every book; some novels have great plots or characters without ever really hitting that point where brilliant insight finds perfect expression.

I started writing down quotes from Our Wives Under the Sea by the second page. Pick any page at random and you’ll find a burnt tongue turn of phrase, something unexpected enough to make you pause and so perfectly fitting as to set you off reading again, wanting more. Why hasn’t anyone said it this way before? was my quiet refrain throughout the book. Why didn’t anyone realize that this, this was the perfect way to say it?

Julia Armfield understands the lyricism of simplicity, letting her prose flow naturally from character insight and situation, never overwrought but never anything less than nuanced. It dances from poignant to profound, knowing so well that whatever universal sentiments she wants to express, they can only be found in the particular. Everyone understands that fizzy first-date feeling, sitting close together and watching some movie, but it works so spectacularly in Our Wives Under the Sea because it’s not everybody’s first date—it’s Miri and Leah’s first date. They don’t watch just anything; they watch Jaws, complete with an adorable level of enthusiasm that only a biologist can bring to the experience.

The setting may be divided between the sea and the land, but it is also always the marriage—Leah and Miri’s marriage is practically a place, one they each carry around with them, one that never stops influencing their actions. This gentle intimacy running through the book renders even the most unsettling scenes eerie instead of outright frightening. There is too much love for Miri to be afraid of her wife. Frightened for her, certainly, but not of her. Not with their long, lovely history, which unfolds in gentle waves against the implacable horror of the now.

Leah is an experienced deep sea researcher with many expeditions under her belt. The trip that sets off this story, while remarkable because of the depth to which the team plan to descend, was nothing special in terms of mission. It was a short, purely exploratory trip. They didn’t know how long they would be forced to remain at depths incompatible with human life. They didn’t know what they would find.

But what did they find? Leah cannot articulate it, and Miri cannot even begin to guess from the disparate oddities that afflict her wife. Not that she entirely wants to start guessing. Miri stays flailingly on the surface of her life, trying not to panic and thereby admit that her situation is dire. She is more comfortable with the low-level hypochondria she inherited from her mother, fussing over the details of shopping and tidying instead of dealing with the big issue head on.

I wonder if others will find this tendency strange. I don’t. I’m sure there are people whose panic looks like the kind of spiraling thoughts and hyperventilation we see so often on screen, but mine looks a lot like Miri’s, the kind of fear that becomes anxiety, because anxiety is so much more familiar and so much easier to deal with than existential threat. Miri has been anxious her whole life, but predictably, that doesn’t actually prepare her for the unexpected. How could she have anticipated a wife who has come back wrong, strange textures to her skin and a craving for salt? How can she get answers when the Centre won’t even return her calls?

I really appreciate that Armfield only really ever refers to the research facility as the Centre. It’s faceless and blandly intimidating from first to last, with nothing for either Miri or the reader to latch on to as a clue about its true purpose. It’s just the center—the dropped stone from which all ripples of the book expand outward. And like a stone, it sinks beyond retrieval long before the waves go still. This is not about finding the Centre’s purpose or plots. This is about the human drama of Leah’s return.

Leah too, as we learn more about her trip, remained as much as possible on the surface of her thoughts. It’s a form of self-defense as well, although against what is much less obvious. Is there anything down there with them? Or are they alone, so utterly alone in the darkness? Which is worse? Leah cannot bring herself to speculate because there is no external validation for any of her theories. Trying to get answers only makes things worse.

I’ll admit, though, that I was hoping to see a bit more of The Martian from the scientists in the submarine. Shouldn’t three highly trained, experienced researchers at least try to maintain a sense of the days, keep records, talk to each other? But they seem to go mad almost at once, and Jelka, who is a devout Catholic, is the worst among them. She becomes a zealot almost at once, gibbering prayers into the darkness and irritating her crewmates to no end. Leah and Matteo do better, but still fall prey to the eerie emptiness of the deep.

I think we’re all afraid of it, at some point or maybe at all points, quietly to ourselves: the idea that even our best beloved person has depths we cannot reach. That there are vast oceanic spaces that both connect us to and divide us from other people, and that we are part of that division, that our own selves have unspeakable places to which one day we might descend, willing or not.

Language gives us an implicit association between depth and profundity, but Armfield disagrees: the deep places are murky with confusion and despair, while the surface is where life happens, quite literally. The most profound bonds are expressed not in dangerous journeys or huge sacrifices; those things are the product of the far more important acts of the everyday, the thousand little gestures that make up a marriage. Leah deals with the bills because she knows how much Miri hates it. Miri doesn’t know much about oceanography, but she wants to hear every little thing Leah wants to explain to her.

The ending is awe-full and awful in its acceptance of this profundity. Miri does not understand what is happening to her wife, does not have a plan or a clue. She can only guess at what will make Leah happy and whole, and so she tries to do it. Despite all risks and consequences to herself, she tries her damnedest to do it. It’s so rare to see a novel that resists, from beginning to end, the tendency toward Hollywood dramatization, the insistence that everyone be an action star or a detective or even a final girl. Miri is no expert, but neither is she terrorized into helplessness or violence. She’s just a woman who loves her wife. That’s enough, Armfield says. In fact, that’s exactly and all she and any of us needs to be.

When Leah returns from a disaster out deep sea mission Miri is thrilled to have her wife back but the woman who returned to her doesn’t seem whole or even human. As they attempt to define their new life on land and deal with the grief and trauma that now define their life and their love.

2.5 stars, rounded up. Our Wives Under the Sea is an intimate novel alternately narrated by married couple Miri and Leah. Leah recently returned from an ocean research expedition gone awry, and since coming home she's been exhibiting strange behaviors: submersing herself in the bathtub for hours at a time, disassociating, eating nothing but salt. Miri's chapters deal with the months after Leah's return, as Miri tries to cope with a wife who seems so strange and so changed, and as she reflects on the earlier, happier days of their relationship. Leah's chapters take us to the deepest reaches of the ocean, where her submarine is stranded during her disastrous research expedition.

It's such a compelling premise, and it gave me strong Annihilation vibes, but after I finished the book I felt strangely unaffected. Julia Armfield's writing is dazzling -- like, stunningly good -- but unfortunately I felt as though the prose was prioritized over character development or a solid narrative arc. I couldn't emotionally connect to either Leah or Miri; their voices sounded so similar that the book might as well have been told in third person. And despite the intimacy of the storytelling, it still seemed like Armfield kept both of her protagonists at arm's length.

It's so puzzling, and I can't quite articulate it, but even though this book is strange and haunting and raw and visceral, it also felt, to me, forgettable. I don't think anything about it will stick with me. There's no momentum to the story; you're thinking both story lines are building to some mind-blowing conclusion, but instead they both just fizzle out. The book never gives up its secrets, which I'm fine with if it's done well -- but in Our Wives Under the Sea, the obscurity just left me frustrated. There are several fascinating scenes, laced with unsettling imagery; there are thoughtful insights about marriage and family and relationships; there's an over-arching oceanic theme that I thought was beautifully handled; but there is no cohesive story to anchor all of these disparate parts.

Our Wives Under the Sea doesn't provide any solid answers, and so it's not really so much about what happened to Leah. It's much more an exploration of holding on and letting go -- of expectations, of relationships. I can appreciate that, but nevertheless, it left me wanting.

Thank you Flatiron Books and Net Galley for making this advanced readers’ copy available to me.

Julia Armfield’s “Our Wives Under the Sea” is an unique portrait of a troubled marriage. Told in brief, alternating chapters, we are introduced to Leah and Miri, a couple whose relationship is threatened when Leah, a marine biologist, returns home irreparably altered after a prolonged and unexpected absence. Miri chronicles the physical changes that plague Leah upon her return, including persistent nose bleeds, as her “blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized,” her cravings for salted foods, like olives and anchovies, and her lengthy soaks in the bathtub which leave a scum of shed skin.

Miri looks back on the couple’s courtship, the “whole bright dailies of our life before this,” and her grief when her wife, who was supposed to be gone for a few weeks on a routine research dive, disappears for six months. Miri’s entreaties to The Centre for Marine Enquiry are met with vague information that there has been a delay, making Miri ponder “How exactly can a submarine be delayed?” While trying to make sense of the contradictory information disclosed by the Centre, Miri tries to quell her grief by joining an on-line group of women who liked to role-play that their husbands had gone to space and becoming obsessed with a website for people whose loved ones had disappeared.

Leah’s voice is reflected in the form of journal entries she wrote while stranded miles below the surface of the sea. Her submarine lost power and was unable to move in any direction. All communications had been lost. Leah and her two crew mates were unable to distinguish night from morning although “time passed despite having nothing to hurry it along.” Although gripped by lethargy, Leah focused on keeping herself from going mad.

Although beautifully crafted and atmospheric, I was never invested in this couple’s story. Leah’s diary entries are remote and do not seem to capture the horror of her situation. The tension of Leah’s plight is further diminished as the reader knows from the opening of the novel that she survives her ordeal. Leah remains a cipher. Although I found her voice to be almost indistinguishable from Leah’s, Miri’s character is more fully developed as she guides the reader on her journey from new love, to profound grief, to wondering if her wife’s return from a prolonged absence is a relief or an invasion. Despite my lukewarm reception, this novel has received significant advanced buzz, and I suspect will be embraced by most readers.