Private Rites

Brilliantly audacious GUARDIAN

Stunning DAZED

Her prose sparkles ELIZA CLARK

Hauntingly good iNEWS

A must read GLAMOUR

From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting, heart-wrenching novel of 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’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.

Armfield writes so gracefully THE TIMES

Evocative yet grounded OBSERVER

A chilling vision of a future capital that I’ve found impossible to shake INEWS

Ballard-ian in apocalyptic scope … Deeply, passionately, messily human PAUL TREMBLAY

A signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty ALICE SLATER

Brilliant, original … an era-defining writer KALIANE BRADLEY

Every page guillotines you with its wisdom TOM BENN