Julia Armfield for Private Rites

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.

‘Julia Armfield is one of my favourite writers’ - FLORENCE WELCH

‘A writer whose next move you wouldn’t want to miss’ - OBSERVER

‘A stunning novel about the end of the world’ - DAZED

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, won the Polari Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022. She lives and works in London.