First and foremost, Julia Armfield is a beautiful, atmospheric writer. The climate aspects remind me of Emily St. John Mandal’s work, how the end is both a thing that has already passed and simultaneously something we are in the midst of. Armfield expertly writes characters in subtle conflict with each other. If Our Wives Under the Sea is about grief between a couple who is still together, then Private Rites is about the grief in a relationship that never had the love we felt like it should. The characters in Our Wives Under the Sea cling to each other desperately, while the sisters push each other away in fits of emotion.

I felt like Our Wives Under the Sea had one truly horrific moment, but was mostly just terrifically sad. This novel feels the same. Do not go into this looking for horror elements. There are plenty of novels that blend literary fiction and horror (Monstrilio comes to mind, as well as Build Your House Around My Body), and I don’t think this is really one of them. This is not to say that this is a bad novel, it’s an excellent one, just one that is barely in the horror realm. When more traditional horror elements are added, I wish that they were given more space in the book to stretch. They are quickly glossed over and then dismissed. The ending felt incredibly rushed to me, and this was so surprising when the rest of the narrative seeps into your bones.

Private Rites is, to me, a novel about the question of the everyday within the disastrous. That is, how do we continue to live our everyday lives while in the midst of an ongoing disaster? How can something that is catastrophic, life-altering on a global scale, become subsumed into, or sit alongside, everyday life?

I ask these questions theoretically here, but in the context of the novel they are anything but. Wherever you are in Private Rites, you are, just like the characters, forced to reckon with the inexorable, immovable, undeniable reality of its central disaster: it will not stop raining. There is rain everywhere, water everywhere, whole cities flooded, their infrastructure long gone. This is the world the characters of the novel must live in, and what makes the novel so compelling, I think, is that simple fact: that they need to continue to live in it, despite the fact that it is slowly becoming uninhabitable. I think sometimes the tendency with these dystopian settings is to Provide Commentary on a disaster, to explain it by pointing to any number of factors (Capitalism, Technology, Oligarchy, etc.), but it can be so much harder to just have your characters live in it, to suffer its daily degradations and deprivations--to experience, day by day, the gradual worsening of an already bad situation, and to have to live through it anyway, because what other choice is there? Despite everything, there is still an everyday to be gotten through: groceries, jobs, commutes, meals, family.

But as much as Private Rites is a climate disaster novel, it's also very much a family drama novel. We have three sisters--Isla, Irene, and Agnes--and an abusive father who, we find out on page one, has just died. From there, the sisters are forced to come together and reckon with how their father's abuse has affected--and continues to affect--not just their own selves, but also their fraught relationships with each other. There are, of course, the material realities of the novel's climate disaster, but I think water is, in a way, also an apt motif for a book whose characters have absorbed these ways of being from their childhoods--been steeped in that abuse such that now, as adults, its traumatic aftereffects seep into their adult lives and relationships. And seep it does: Armfield doesn't give us any big flashbacks to illuminate this past, but rather flashes of memory that constantly intrude on the sisters when they're alone and together. We don't get the full picture, but we get bits and pieces of it, and the effect is all the more powerful for this restraint.

Climate disaster + childhood trauma--Private Rites seems maybe like an unrelentingly bleak novel, but it's really not. It's not an upbeat novel by any means, but despite the bleak circumstances, it never feels one-note. The characters are fleshed out, shown to us in both their worst and most vulnerable moments; and even as the novel's climate disaster rages on, its characters still manage to have faith, even if just a little, in something--be it a person, a relationship, an act, a belief.

Private Rites is definitely (and unexpectedly) one of my favourite reads of the year, and such a different novel from Armfield's debut: longer, more ambitious, and, I think, ultimately more satisfying.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield filled me with a creeping dread in the best way. Gorgeous at the sentence-level, haunting as a whole, reading this book was an experience I won’t soon forget.

If you read the synopsis and thought, like I did, this was going to focus on three sisters living in a society that is regressing back to the dark ages in the time of a slowly encroaching apocalypse, you will not be a fan of this book. The story is centered around relationships; between the siblings, the loved ones they have left in their lives, and the family that sees them as burdens. The sisters have their roles to a trope; the young party girl, the middle child desperate for validation, and the eldest who bears the weight of responsibility. You follow divorce, growing love, desparation and more. A father who wants very little to do with his daughters. A mother teetering on the brink of insanity and the inability to cope with the world around her. If these sorts of literary themes interest you. Absolutely pick up this book.

There are also two looming shadows throughout the story. The first is the looming apocolypse that slowly and literally rains upon the world as the sea levels rise from global warming. Without spoiling too much, the second is where the religious and ritualistic themes come into play. Unfortunately it is in the background of the book and is only mentioned sparingly.

One thing that is consistent across every page is the engaging and beautiful writing of Julia Armfield.

Since the book focused on areas that I have read more times than I can count, I enjoyed the writing and the world building more than the story.

3.5 stars rounded up

Thank you to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for this arc

I might have gone into it with too high of expectations, but this was actually a bit of a let down! I will say Julia Armfield’s “worst” is still so much better than so many other authors’ best. Her prose is absolutely stunning, this was just as atmospheric and damp as Our Wives Under the Sea. She also nails the complexity of female relationships while weaving in an unsettling tale so well. The ending was definitely the strongest part of the book.
However, this was very slow and a little messy. There were so many passages that just felt like it wasn’t really going anywhere? And unlike OWUtS which I devoured in one sitting, I felt myself having to put this down because the pacing was slow.

ARC provided by NetGalley

The world is slowly drowning in ceaseless rains. Cities are crumbling, the sky has gone dark, the government has all but vanished. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes are dealing with the unexpected passing of their estranged father and have found that grief during the slow descent of the end times makes for a strange sort of mourning, made stranger yet by their complex and fractured relationships with each other.

Isla; clinical, unyielding, guarding her desire for emotional connection with her life.
Irene; unpredictable, enabling, caught in the crossfires.
Agnes; the half-sister, vanishing like smoke on a whim and returning only when she pleases.

Against a bleak landscape awash with loss, the sisters reunite in the grand glass house that is largest piece of their father's remaining legacy. As they sift through the estate and the memories that lie within it, they find themselves confronted with the reality of who their father was and how he shaped the women they are.

Already deemed Julie Armfield's "lesbian Lear," "Private Rites" is a sleepy, slow-marching novel of sisterhood set in the end times as water quite literally washes away the earth. As always, Armfield leads with beautiful prose and imagery that few authors do better; but overall, this lacked the unsettling, bewitching quality that rendered "Our Wives Under the Sea" one of my best books of the year. At times, "Private Rites" felt directionless without intention, enormous narrative paragraphs took over pages and pages without much discernible tie-in to the overall story.

While I loved Armfield's use of water throughout, something about his felt unfinished to me, particularly the ending that seemed to come out of nowhere. Undeniably well-written, "Private Rites" isn't the Armfield novel I was expecting and doesn't live up to what its synopsis presents.

A new book by Julia Armfield!? In the words of Taylor Swift: DROP EVERYTHING NOW.

Our Wives Under the Sea was one of my favorite books of 2022 and, hundreds of books later, has remained in my all-time top-10 list. Private Rites has the same eerie, unsettled atmosphere Armfield captures so well - only this time told through even more perspectives, including not only the three sisters but the deteriorating city in which they life. It's reminiscent of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven on multiple levels - the shifting POVs with the occasional interlude from an omniscient narrator, the exquisite sentence-level writing, the haunting speculative concept.

The story takes place in a not-too-distant future in which climate change has led to near-constant rain; much of the city is underwater, buildings are rotting and collapsing, and subway lines and highways have slowly but inexorably given way to boats and water taxis - that is, when there's still any infrastructure at all. The sense of creeping dread is palpable - and especially powerful set against the normalcy with which the city's inhabitants, to various degrees of success, attempt to go about their lives.

In the first sentence of the blurb, Private Rites was framed as a reimagining of King Lear, but that didn't quite fit my experience. Yes, it centers on three sisters reeling from the trauma inflicted by their controlling, withholding, manipulative father ... but I don't think that scenario is limited to Shakespeare! It's certainly a family drama, but the framing set me up to expect a much stronger relationship to the original. (That said, it's probably been 15 years since I read King Lear, so it's entirely possible I missed references.)

I think Armfield did a spectacular job at bringing to life the complex, convoluted relationships at the heart of the story - and, of course, at the atmospheric worldbuilding, depicting a future so eerie and vivid I dreamed about it two nights in a row. But I'm not sure I loved the horror element, nor did I totally get it. (Maybe another Shakespeare / King Lear reference I didn't understand?) I would have preferred more or less - the amount we got struck me as a bit too much buildup for a too-quick payoff. Again based on the blurb, I think I was expecting something more along the lines of Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno Garcia or Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, and it wound up being more subtle - and then more jarring - than both.

Somewhere around 4.5 stars for me, rounded up to 5. I look forward to stocking and shelf-talking this in the bookstore. Thanks to Flatiron and NetGalley for my advance copy.