When June faces social media accusations and staggering writer’s block, she can’t shake the feeling that someone knows the truth about what she’s done. June edits the novel and passes it off as her own, and no one seems the wiser, but once the novel becomes a smash success, cracks begin to form. When Athena suddenly dies, June, almost accidentally, walks off with her latest manuscript, a novel about the World War I Chinese Labour Corps. While June has had little success since publication and is struggling to write her second novel, Athena has become a darling of the publishing industry, much to June’s frustration. after graduation, and are both writers, but the similarities end there. June Hayward and Athena Liu went to Yale together, moved to D.C. What happens when a midlist author steals a manuscript and publishes it as her own? The bleakest horror story can also be a love story Armfield deftly illustrates how. Is Leah's current circumstance just further along the continuum of human understanding of loss and endurance? Launching her book with epigraphs from both Moby-Dick and Jaws, Armfield guides the reader through the liminal spaces in the couple’s lives and approaches them with an occasionally ironic humor. The unearthly circumstances of Leah’s underwater captivity and mutation are horrible enough but take on new meaning in relation to other, more understandable situations Miri has faced in her life: the metamorphosis her mother underwent during a fatal illness and the sometimes-irritating voices she hears constantly emanating from an unseen neighbor’s television. Structured like the ocean’s levels, deepening and darkening the further one descends, the novel slowly reveals that the horrific situation Leah tolerated may not have not been as accidental as it first seemed. When Leah returns home, things do not go as Miri had envisioned her unanticipated transformation-a terrifying dissolution of her human form into something unfamiliar and strange-challenges Miri’s assumptions about the course of their life together. Miri’s narrative and excerpts from Leah’s diary of the mission relate their growing awareness-and grudging management-of the changes and relationship losses they both endure as a result of their prolonged separation. Then Leah, a marine scientist, embarks on a three-week submarine expedition during which things seem to go disastrously wrong, and she and her shipmates disappear for six months at the very bottom of the ocean. Leah and Miri lead a conventional married life of comfortable routine, shared love of movies, and happiness at having found each other.

What happens to a marriage when one spouse is no longer the person you married?

Our wives beneath the sea