For anyone averse to the sea or confined spaces, the prospect of a small craft sinking to the bottom of the ocean is horrifying enough. The horror in the novel centres around Leah, both her time on the submarine and after she returns to land. The novel makes use of multiple horror motifs: submarine entrapment in the ocean’s abyss, losses of time, hearing ghostly voices, and horrifically transformed bodies.

As the story develops, the novel moves through the ocean’s vertical zones (sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyssal, hadal), with the growing darkness of these zones and the increasing biological weirdness of their inhabitants reflecting the progression of the narrative, as we see the creeping horror of the ocean brought onto land. The novel is told in two alternating perspectives and voices: Leah’s, narrating her time in a submarine during a deep-sea research mission that left her and two crewmates trapped at the bottom of the ocean after an unexplained system-failure and her wife Miri’s, as she waits and presumes Leah dead until her impossible return six months later. But, like the sea, it has unknown depths and horrors to which they will sink. The lives of Miri and Leah are as complete and furnished as a house, their minute actions and seemingly mundane memories building a complete structure of their relationship.

‘The deep sea is a haunted house’ is how Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea opens, and the same can be said for the book itself.

Our wives under the sea synopsis