Julia Armfield

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 arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, 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.

More estranged than ever, the sisters’ 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.

Private Rites

Clara Gauthier

“Oh, Jesus Christ," Isla hisses, slapping a palm down on the table in annoyance, "don't you ever get tired of going on like this?"

 Irene sits back in her chair. Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I'm like this and that makes me worse.

At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?

Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever. 

…sometimes she pictured her mother spreading across her like lichen, like something resembling skin.

People do what they have always done, in the knowledge that choice is limited. 

Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once. She's in her father's kitchen at the age of twenty-four, but so is she at age five, age nine, age eleven. She is standing where she is with her sisters and her father is here, and yet he isn't. 

Private Rites quotes

Join the club