Private Rites

October 1, 2024

Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea, a Lambda Literary Award and Goodreads Choice Award finalist) writes a speculative reimagining of King Lear. In a drowning world, where arcane rituals and religions are returning, three estranged sisters go home after their father's death and find a revelation in his will, but something even more sinister is looming. Prepub Alert.

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September 9, 2024
Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea) offers a grim and absorbing retelling of King Lear set in a damp near-future city resembling London. It’s rained for so long that the infrastructure has collapsed and residents, who travel by water taxi, wonder if they’re living in the end-times. Navigating this “endless ending” are three sisters—Isla, Irene, and Agnes—who are also coming to terms with the death of their famous father, a pompous architect of “mad glass boxes for rich people.” Not only did the sisters hate him, they barely tolerate one another. Reunited on the eve of the funeral, they bicker (“I don’t think... you can fix however many years of him playing us off against each other,” Agnes says) before discovering a new dimension of their father’s cruelty when his will is read. The character work is well done, with chapters revealing eldest daughter Isla’s bossiness, Irene’s struggle to stand out as the middle sister, and Agnes’s irresponsibility. Though the apocalyptic denouement feels a bit contrived, Armfield succeeds at conjuring her characters’ existential fears. This well-wrought family drama is tough to shake. Agent: Sam Copeland, RCW Literary.

November 1, 2024
A dystopian future sets the stage for this Shakespeare-inspired novel in which three sisters deal with the death of their emotionally abusive father. Armfield's flooded city is disintegrating from unrelenting rain and is littered with detritus from ill-conceived, panic-driven efforts to postpone certain planetary demise. Armfield skillfully evokes a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness, richly depicting pervasive but enervated civil unrest borne of desperation. Isla, Irene, and Agnes gather at their uniquely adapted childhood home, their architect father's technological masterpiece. The deceased was a temperamental genius whose mercurial parenting encouraged deep rifts among his daughters, contributed to their maladaptive personalities, and calcified their combative family roles. Armfield's portrayal is deeply psychological, told in rotating narration, and imbued with fantastically detailed world-building. The plot is secondary to the characterization of the city, which serves as an extended metaphor for the very complex sibling relationships. Armfield's haunting picture of a speculative future may be difficult to stomach, but the inclusion of devastating family dysfunction personalizes its tragic consequences.

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December 1, 2024
Three queer sisters, one dead father, and a fraught inheritance in a flooded city at the end of the world. "People think it's just hellfire and brimstone, four horseman and out, but actually the end times go on and on and on," remarks Irene Carmichael with regard to the Book of Revelation, and Armfield's third novel seems to have taken a leaf from it, though she and her quarrelsome sisters also have a foot inKing Lear. Isla, Irene, and their half sister, Agnes, are the daughters of famous, and famously nasty, architect Stephen Carmichael, known for daring structures custom-built for the partially underwater environment. As the novel opens, he has died, and the estranged sisters have reluctantly gathered to figure out how they can get to the hospital to view his body. With most modes of transport washed out, unreliable ferries that depart from randomly placed jetties are the main way to get around. While the three women have difficult personalities on their own, their father exacerbated their troubles both during his life and after his death with disbursements and bequeathals structured to pit them against each other. Meanwhile, Isla, a therapist, continues to see patients, though her wife has left her to explore communities outside the city. Irene has lost heart for her advanced studies in Christian theology, but her partner, Jude, keeps an even keel, cooking pasta dinners and "focusing solely on what's going on right in front of them, as if everything else is irrelevant and incapable of causing them harm." Agnes, a cranky barista, makes cappuccinos and writes the wrong names on them on purpose. Armfield garnered lots of love from literary horror fans with her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022): These readers will surely relish her impressive post-climate-catastrophe vision (horror tropes included). For some readers, however, the unhappy sisters and their ruined planet will be oppressive. When at one point a peripheral character develops a penchant for "miserabilist literature," one thinks of recommending the very book he appears in. Character-driven speculative fiction with strong worldbuilding and fine writing.

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