Her own hypochondria (“I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer”), along with the dread of the heritable condition that killed her mother, mean deterioration looms as large in Miri’s psyche as it does in Leah’s body. Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah. Its a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep, deep sea. Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah. Named as a book to look out for by Guardian, i-D, Autostraddle, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, Stylist and DAZED. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. “The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah.” Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. “It went on too long and too helplessly,” Miri explains. To her wife, Leah’s initial symptoms – bleeding gums, strange sensitivities, lack of appetite – characterise a change that feels almost like betrayal. Seeking to answer it herself, Miri spends hours on hold to the shadowy “Centre for Marine Enquiry”, which organised the expedition – though as Leah’s ordeal comes into focus, so do the reasons staff might not have felt equipped to explain it over the phone.ĭeprived of natural light and stimulation, tortured by sounds that test her sanity, Leah’s time in the submarine sets off a chain of events she is powerless to halt.
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