Pushcart Prize-winning novelist Julia Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea) offers an engrossing look at existential dread and the bonds that keep people afloat in Private Rites. A speculative retelling of King Lear by way of Lars von Trier's Melancholia that focuses on the perspective of the three daughters, Armfield's novel is set in a drowning world where it won't stop raining. Under the constant threat of submersion, most of the world struggles with what it means to live during the probable end of the world. But the source of existential dread for sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes can be found much closer to home, in their wealthy, manipulative father. After his sudden death, the three women are shocked to find out that he has left his floating home, the design for which made him millions, to only one of them. As they struggle to determine what their relationships to each other will look like in the absence of their father's control, they begin to realize that a larger, more dangerous game is being played with their lives.
As always, Armfield's prose is as mesmerizing as it is cathartic. Whether describing Isla's desperate need to hear her patients' anxieties to assuage her own or detailing the sometimes painfully sensual intimacies Agnes latches onto to avoid feeling adrift, Armfield demonstrates an unmatched intuitive touch for characters and relationships. And while none of the three sisters at this novel's core are perfect, together the intricacies with which they write and rewrite their relationships to one another vibrate with hope. When living in a world in crisis, Armfield asks, who will we reach out to? And who will reach back? --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor