Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

A Book Review...

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield was my last read of 2022. If you didn’t know, I co-host a weekly conversational bookish podcast called TBR Lowdown and this was one our December 2022 book pick. We had a great discussion about this book. You can watch or listen to that episode.

After reading Our Wives Under the Sea, I knew at some point I’d read her debut short story collection Salt Slow, which I read in July.

These stories touch on the macabre and weird. In one story a young woman, recently dumped by her boyfriend, sets out to build the perfect man in the cellar of the house she shares with two friends. In another story, a girl is plagued by a terrible skin disease and describes all of her physical changes.

I DREAM IN sheddings-spend my nights sunk deep beneath seas of teeth and fingernails, the suffocation of skin cast off and left unbodied. A constant grasping and losing, a catching hold of things that turn to water in my hands, My mattress is wrapped in rubber sheeting, a guard against bedsores and infection, and my sleep takes on something of this slippery quality. In the mornings, my mother checks me over with a swab of antiseptic, tweezes moltings from my shoulders with a minimal degree of fuss.

This is an interesting collection about women and their bodies. Armfield is widely imaginative and does weird well.

I’m currently reading her latest novel Private Rites, and as I suspected, am enjoying it a great deal.