Isla, Irene and Agnes. Three sisters with a fractured relationship and tetchy dynamic, drawn back together after their father’s death. Navigating a city of perpetual rain, where the dead can’t be buried or they will actually rise again, the sisters move through, and exist in, this sodden landscape; a place where the daily produce many of us would take for granted is now harder to come back, and where power outages are a regular occurrence, with mysterious sirens sounding from the depths of buildings. 

Julia Armfield has to be the queen of atmospheric, slow-build, haunting, waterlogged writing. Add in a startling opening chapter to have us on the edge of our seats from the word go and you have this tense, unsettling novel rippling with undercurrents of dread and helplessness in the face of the inevitable. As the water in the city slowly rises, so does our feeling that something is closing in on the sisters. Three complex and flawed characters, so well drawn. The novel deftly explores their current relationships and how childhood can shape our adult relationships; their individual memories of their relationship with their difficult father, a famous but stern and reclusive architect; their strained relationships between sisters after years of being pitted against each other; and their microcosmic sense of loss in the grand scheme of the dire state of the planet. 

Armfield is such a distinctive writer and in this novel, which blends a stark vision of where the climate crisis could be heading with a raw delve into questions of family dynamics and histories, identity and love, she brings us yet another striking and haunting story. 

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Privates Rites is published by 4th Estate on June 11th. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the DRC. 

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Julia Armfield’s work has been published in Granta, The White Review and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of Salt Slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2023. She lives and works in London.