Private Rites

‘One of my favourite writers’ - Florence Welch, lead singer of Florence and the Machine

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

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.

There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded

It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else

It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. 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. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their 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 imperilled world.

‘A book of extraordinary sentences, set in end-times which feel bleakly real yet pulse with a tireless, tangible force of love’ - Megan Hunter, author of The End We Start From

‘Armfield’s signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty’ Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller

‘Julia Armfield is an era-defining writer’ - Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

‘An astonishing ambitious novel’ - Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark