A review by emilyinherhead
Private Rites by Julia Armfield

4.0

I’ve been saving my early copy of Private Rites because I enjoyed Julia Armfield’s previous two books so much and knew this one would be great as well. But I finally picked it up just before release day (December 3) and as expected, it was a moody, unsettling, and memorable experience.

Armfield is reimagining King Lear, but you don’t need to be familiar with the Shakespearean source material to understand or appreciate this story. It’s set in London during a more advanced stage of the climate crisis—everything is wet and flooded, it’s always raining, and the city’s infrastructure is struggling against the water’s effects. We follow three sisters, all queer, daughters of a famous architect, who learn of their father’s death early in the novel and are then forced together to grieve and process and handle the logistical particulars of his passing. Meanwhile they are each navigating their own careers and love lives and internal states, and as the story progresses, it becomes clear that something is happening with the house that their father left behind. I don’t know that the ending quite worked for me; the pacing really picks up in the last few chapters and I found myself a little confused with everything that was going on. But! That didn’t change how I felt about the book overall. Julia Armfield is SO good at creating atmosphere and building unease, and I know I will remember the slightly foreboding feeling of this novel for a long time to come.