Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Publication Date: 11/06/2024
 
The bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea returns with a stunning, unsettling novel following three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.
 
It's been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.
 
Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.
 
As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Soon it becomes clear that others have also taken an interest in both his estate and in them, and that perhaps their inheritance may not be theirs alone.
 
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 ‘A witty, brutal examination of the ways that the bonds of family can be strangulating, or transfigured by the painful pressure of intimacy into something devastatingly, unfairly tender; and one of the most brilliant, original visions of climate crisis Britain I have ever read. Private Rites has the elemental power of a thunderstorm and the thrilling emotional honesty of a first kiss. Julia Armfield is an era-defining writer’ - Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
 
Praise for Our Wives Under the Sea:
 
‘Deeply romantic and fabulously strange’ Sarah Waters
 
‘Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers, Our Wives Under The Sea moves fluidly between horror story and love story, the gorgeous and the grotesque. A contemporary gothic fairy tale, sublime in its creepiness’ - Florence Welch