Julia Armfield on Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel: Fiction

Julia Armfield is the author of the story collection salt slow. Her work has been published in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine, and Best British Short Stories. Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel (Flatiron Books) follows Leah, a marine biologist. She left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time, her submarine sank to the sea floor. Now Leah is changed. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was she was supposed to be studying before she and her crew were stranded, Leah carried part of it onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp. Our Wives Under the Sea explores the unknowable depths within each of us and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.

Kristen Arnett is the author of With Teeth (Riverhead Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction; The New York Times bestselling novel Mostly Dead Things, which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award; and the story collection Felt in the Jaw. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. A queer writer based in Florida, she has written for The New York Times, Guernica, BuzzFeed, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, Salon, and elsewhere. She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with author Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel (Flatiron Books).