In conversation with Julia Armfield at Waterstones Deansgate

We are delighted to welcome Julia Armfield, author of the acclaimed Our Wives Under The Sea, to Deansgate in celebration of her latest novel Private Rites. Joined in conversation by debut author Jodie Matthews, the pair will be discussing Julia's works and answering audience questions, followed by a signing.
About Private Rites
It's been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Soon it becomes clear that others have also taken an interest in both his estate and in them, and that perhaps their inheritance may not be theirs alone.
Private Rites is a stunning, unsettling novel following three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

About the authors
Julia Armfield is a fiction writer, living in London with her girlfriend who is fine and their cat who is garbage. Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022 and won the Polari Prize 2023.

Jodie Matthews is from Cornwall and lives in Manchester. Meet Me At The Surface is her first novel, and was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Blue Pencil First Novel Award 2021.

Host or Publisher Waterstones