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Goldsboro Books

9780008608033

Private Rites

Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Publisher Fourth Estate

Genre: General Fiction

Released:

  • Signed by the author
  • Hardback
  • UK First Edition, First Printing


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About the book

'Stunning' DAZED

'Her prose sparkles' ELIZA CLARK

'A book of extraordinary sentences' MEGAN HUNTER

From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting 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 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.

'Lyrical, haunting, unsettling' Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World

'Armfield's latest novel is the author at her finest' Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth

‘[A] signature cocktail of deadpan wit and staggering beauty’ Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller

‘Brilliant, original … an era-defining writer’ Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time

‘Astonishing, ambitious’ Sarvat Hasin, author of The Giant Dark

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About the Author

Julia Armfield

Julia Armfield's work has been published inGranta,The White ReviewandBest British Short Stories2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for theSunday TimesYoung Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won theWhite ReviewShort Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author ofsalt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel,Our Wives Under the Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and won the Polari Prize 2023. She lives and works in London.

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