Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

"Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. 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. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage"--

Left too much work for the reader. Sometimes I feel mystery is relied on to seem clever when sometimes it works in lieu of actually being bold enough to commit to stand for something. Kind of felt like the first of the new Dune films where it's setting up the story and the protein - except this doesn't have any follow up. There's so much possibility in ocean sci fi. Reading In Ascension by Martin Macinnes, which covers similar ground but gives so much imaginative yet believable detail.

This novel made me feel so much and yet I can't really say what emotions. It was beautifully written and not in such a confusing way as many short novels always seem to start. I was very invested in the story and the characters were all very interesting. It was as much about grief and loss as it was about love.

I honestly don't know how to feel, perhaps because I can't easily fit a theme or a point to the story as I usually would. It's as if the point was just to make me feel.

First of all, yes, this is a singularly strange book: Miri's beloved wife Leah has finally returned from a deep-sea exploration gone wrong, and she seems to slowly but surely be turning into some kind of ocean creature. The story alternates between Miri's and Leah's perspectives, but we never hear from Leah once she surfaces - we only learn, in bits and pieces that jigsaw-puzzle together around holes never quite filled in, what might have happened in that dark and crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea.

If pushed to describe it, I'd say imagine vestiges of the plot from Dr. Franklin's Island (Ann Halam), with the stunned disbelief - articulated in the most hauntingly beautiful ways - of finding oneself in a completely new reality from Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), with amassing undertones of the amorphous dread so compellingly conveyed in Leave the World Behind (Rumaan Alam).

While the plot is extraordinary in every sense of the word, the story manages to be deeply, heartbreakingly relatable. Ambiguous loss - the specific type of grief you feel when the person you love still exists, in a sense, but isn't the same - is universal, and this eerie and beautiful book is fundamentally about it.

I loved this book and believe it will be one of the most-discussed, most-acclaimed of 2022.