Welcome back to our bi-monthly reading series, Caoilinn in Conversation, featuring authors that call the UK and Ireland home, curated by the super-talented Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter. On July 21st we helped celebrate Julia Armfield's new novel, Our Wives Under the Sea.

About Our Wives Under the Sea:
Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.


By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.


About the authors:
Julia Armfield is a fiction writer with a Master’s in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She lives and works in London. Her work has been published in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon Magazine and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. Her debut collection, salt slow, was published by Picador in May 2019, and by Flatiron in the US. salt slow was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020 and was shortlisted for the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction 2020. Her story ‘Longshore Drift’ won a Pushcart Prize in 2020.

Caoilinn Hughes' latest novel, The Wild Laughter, won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award 2021. It was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards' Novel of the Year, the RTÉ Radio 1 Listener's Choice Award 2020, the Dalkey Literary Awards, and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first novel Orchid & The Wasp (2018) won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was a finalist for four other prizes. Her short fiction won The Moth Short Story Prize, the Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year and an O.Henry Prize. She is the 2021 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.


You can purchase their books through our website (exileinbookville.com) and each book comes with a signed bookplate!