Our Wives Under the Sea

Our Wives Under the Sea is a 2022 British horror novel by Julia Armfield and her debut novel. It follows a married lesbian couple who become distant after one of them returns from a disastrous deep-sea dive. It received positive reviews.

The two women are named and distinct. Miri is a grant writer, and Leah is a deep-sea researcher working for an organisation called the Centre; she surfaces from an expedition to the bottom of the ocean with intense physical and behavioural changes, including skin that has the texture of a drowned person's. She spends much of her time in the bathtub and talks mainly about the ocean. The expedition did not simply go wrong: the vessel was stranded on the ocean floor, and what Leah has brought back with her is treated as a fact of her body rather than as a rumour.

Miri's position is the substance of the book, since she keeps calling the Centre for information and is usually unable to reach anyone, and the domestic scenes are what the horror is built from rather than any external threat.