What Themes Does Our Wives Under The Sea Explore In Modern Fiction?

Having just finished it, I'm struck by how it's a book that somehow makes the vastness of the ocean feel like a suffocating interior space. The obvious theme is grief, but it's not the loud, dramatic kind. It's the quiet, creeping horror of living with someone who has returned but is fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Leah comes back from a deep-sea expedition that went wrong, and she's just... not right. Miri has to care for this person who looks like her wife but is slowly becoming something else, leaking saltwater and drawn to the dark. The domestic horror of that daily erosion is more terrifying than any monster.

I think a lot of genre labels get slapped on it—cosmic horror, queer fiction, literary fiction—but at its heart, it's about the failure of language. How do you articulate a loss when the person is physically present? Miri tries to communicate, to understand, but Leah's experience is literally unspeakable, locked away in the crushing pressure of the deep. The novel itself becomes an act of translation, trying to find words for a trauma that exists beyond human scale. It also, in a weirdly tender way, explores devotion. What does 'in sickness and in health' mean when the sickness is a metaphysical transformation? The love isn't gone; it's strained and warped, but it persists, even as the familiar shape of the relationship dissolves.

It's also a sharp critique of institutional neglect. The shadowy marine research centre that sent Leah down is totally absent in the aftermath, leaving Miri alone to deal with the fallout. That feels incredibly modern—the way systems extract what they need from people and then abandon them when they break. The prose is so clean and precise, which makes the surreal, bodily horror of Leah's change even more potent. It lingers, like salt on your skin.