by Julia Armfield
Flatiron Books
12/3/24, hardcover
SKU: 9781250344311
From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world
It's been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father's most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene's relationship is straining at the seams, Isla's ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother's long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters' lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
Reviews:
"Captivating...Probing...Armfield forgoes sentimental scenes and simple answers for suspense and horror, building an eerie mystery...Armfield makes brilliant use of the glass house as a site of secrets and violence; like Shakespeare's King Lear, Carmichael's structures withstand time and tide. Armfield invites us in, honoring the greatness and darkness of Lear's drama. Then, thrillingly, she starts throwing stones." --The New York Times Book Review
"[Armfield] is both poet and prophet of the watery and the queer and the channels connecting them...Seductive...Compelling...Brilliantly audacious." --Guardian
"[Armfield] depicts the eerily normalized terrors of environmental catastrophe within a world that refuses to confront it its impending demise with an unsettling lyrical beauty...Armfield lends a quasi-mythic dimension to an intimate story of sibling rivalry and familial disinheritance, set to a thudding backdrop of ceaseless rain that by the novel's end had begun to infect my dreams." --Daily Mail
"Slick and slippery, Julia Armfield's latest novel is the author at her finest. Private Rites is committed to plumbing the depths of what might be unknowable: the monstrous, inexorable thrust of climate change and the delicate, dangerous tangle of family and sisterhood. Armfield writes the kind of books that stick with you for life. I am proud to be one of her biggest fans." --Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth
"Another stunning work by Armfield, a gorgeous hybrid of the gothic, deep character studies, and a half-drowned landscape. The writing is so sharp and distinctive it'll make you gasp. A page-turner that makes you slow down to appreciate the brilliance of the prose. One of my favorite novels of the past few years." --Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation
About the Author:
Julia Armfield is the author of the novels Private Rites and Our Wives Under the Sea, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and Best Debut Novel, and the story collection salt slow. Her work has been published in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon, and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. She is the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Awards in 2019. She lives and works in London.