In a world where rain has completely changed the landscape, the people respond with a series of rituals and religious practices that evoke beliefs formerly tossed to the wayside.

In PRIVATE RITES, the very talented Julia Armfield (her debut, OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, is one of the best novels written in the last two decades and is destined to be a classic) gives us her version of King Lear and his daughters. Reimagining Shakespeare’s famous tale of familial woe, Armfield puts three disparate and estranged daughters into contact once again in order to decode the mysteries of their father’s life and livelihood.

PRIVATE RITES is about a drowning world in which the tides bring back together Isla, Irene and Agnes when their father, a gruff and accomplished architect, dies. He lived in a huge house made of glass, his most famous building, and in it lie the answers to long-held questions about his work and the memories he kept from them about his own life. However, when his will is revealed, so are things that will test the sisters’ newfound solidarity and the future of the world as they know it.

"...a hypnotic read.... A significant and unique achievement, PRIVATE RITES is a book that readers will revel in time and again."

Their mother disappeared when they were children, and the now-grown women are still trying to piece together the specifics of her life. As each of them faces difficulties with their significant others, it is the relationship with their mother and all the people who have come to them looking for further information into their own lives that they would like to fix the most. There is a sense of impending importance to their daily lives, and the sisters get the feeling that they have been put in this place and time in order to accomplish a goal that can be fulfilled only by figuring out the other puzzles in their lives.

Armfield is a provocative writer who layers in sexually explicit scenes and gives her protagonists more dimension than most characters in similar speculative stories receive from lesser writers. Isla, Irene and Agnes are fully formed females, with powers that jump off the page and yearnings that will make readers form an immediate and tight bond with them. As tricky as the main plot is, it is the sisters and their lives that give PRIVATE RITES its emotional resonance. I don’t often come across speculative fiction where the characters are fully fleshed out in this way, but Armfield is a master who is able to multitask and give the women and their parents equal importance in the narrative.

PRIVATE RITES does not skirt around the things that tumble an interpersonal relationship. Instead it dives deeply into them, building a compelling significance to the storyline by focusing on the women’s needs and the ways in which they are asked to change in order to figure things out. Isla, Irene and Agnes are three very specific characters, not a Greek chorus, and their ins and outs with each other give a pull and tension to the ways in which all the other people here relate to them. It is haunting and heartbreaking without being schmaltzy or fake.

This is a hypnotic read. If you’ve had the joy of experiencing OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA, you’ll be prepared for its slow burn, but you won’t be able to put it down. It's rare to read a science fiction tale based on a classic that doesn’t rely on the specifics we expect from them. Instead it's a cauldron that fires up slowly and doesn’t stop burning until the end of the story. A significant and unique achievement, PRIVATE RITES is a book that readers will revel in time and again.