Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

"The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness." From these first lines, Armfield sets up a lyrically structured story that is part wonder and part logic. Part sheer beauty and part stark science. Mixing Gothic elements alongside scientific facts, the lines between what is real and what is decidedly unrealistic become blurred.

Leah has returned home to her wife, Miri, after a deep-sea mission ends in disaster, but she's not the same. Something from the ocean depths has come back with her, altering their lives in strange ways. As Miri grapples with the changes, she has to come to terms with the idea of releasing this woman she loves as she continues to slip away.

“‘Let go of them in the water’ is something I read once. ...Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink.”

Armfield's debut novel faces head on the all-encompassing feelings surrounding the pair of warring states of love and grief.

Audiobook, as narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway: Baldwin and Holdaway did amazing jobs. Their individual voices both were wonderfully suited to this atmospheric and melancholic novel, but with the perspectives shifting back and forth between them, the marriage of their performances really brought another level of emotion to the surface.