The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.
page 84, Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about Private Rites by Julia Armfield through Plant Based Bride’s 10 best books of 2025 video. I was deeply moved by her description of the book and the personal connection to the book’s themes that she felt so I ended up putting in my to-be-read list. I hadn’t heard of or read anything by this author before this.
In a bid to start off 2026’s reading year with a wider genre variety, this book was one of many that I also placed library holds for and it arrived just in time for my first library haul of the year. I didn’t expect to be reading two literary fiction books back to back but here we are.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
I have been pondering the nature of this book ever since I finished it and I have not quite settled on how I feel about it. However to begin with let me provide a brief description of the outer skeleton of this book. Private Rites is a literary speculative fiction book which revolves around three estranged sisters navigating grief, loss, and queer love in a world that is in the middle of a slow moving apocalypse.
Characters
The three main characters are three sisters – Isla, the eldest, a therapist. Irene, one year younger than Isla, works a boring desk job, is in a relationship with Jude. Agnes, the youngest, works in a cafe, half sister to the other two, 10 years younger than Isla, falls in love with Stephanie. Majority of the book’s story is told from the perspective of these three sisters with occasional forays into the perspective of the “City” and side characters like Jude or Stephanie.
I’ll be upfront about this, I did not like any of the main characters in this book. I find all of them annoying in different ways and the particular quirks of each are not endearing to me. The closest comparison for the dynamic of the sisters in this book that I can think of is another literary fiction novel called Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors. The difference being that the characters in that book are to my mind, while no less flawed have more characteristics that I liked.
I found myself quite tired of reading their arguments and more specifically their inability to actually reconcile their differences. I understand that the specific nature of their relationships makes it difficult but Isla and Irene especially appear to be solidly stuck in the past and unable to let go of old jealousies and grudges. It is frustrating to read.
I mentioned earlier that the “City” is a character and this is something I found intriguing. I generally like it when the locations and environments in books become characters of their own. That said, the City POV is not quite a character here as much as a device to do worldbuilding with. It felt more like a dissociated disconnected look at the environment our main characters are in. Adding on to this, the city is never named but I assumed it to be a near-future London, UK because that is where the author resides.
Dark nights are more common these days. The power is unreliable and spotty, blackouts not infrequent, occasionally scheduled, other times brought about by the weather or by bad luck. Power is expensive, light parcelled out at a premium and frequently easier to go without.
page 114, City
Themes
How she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?
page 64
Private Rites is at its best when it is grappling with this themes which include – grief and loss over the death of a parent, queer love, familial estrangement, and climate change. That last one I’ll get into it later because that is where part of my confusion with this book lies.
While I found the sisters themselves to be generally unlikable I found that the way their relationship to each other was depicted, the way they talk to each other or ignore each other, the things left unsaid, the assumptions made, the resigned nature of having to deal with a long lasting trauma – all of these were depicted with nuance and care.
As for the themes of grief and loss over the death of a parent, I’ll say this – my experience with grief and loss is something I have talked about already so I’ll just say it is different from the experiences of the characters in this book because the relationship I had with my deceased father and the ones I have with my two siblings is very different from the ones portrayed in this book.
That said, like the depiction of the estranged sisters, I found the way grief and loss was portrayed in this book to be suitably nuanced and handled with the kind of care necessary for such a topic. I didn’t find myself overwhelmingly moved by the story like Plant Based Bride was but Julia Armfield writes beautifully about these topics.
I don’t have much to say about the themes of queer love depicted in this book. All three sisters are lesbians with relationships in various stages of development and ending. I liked the romance subplot that Agnes got, I thought there were some tender, heartwarming moments amongst the turmoil of the rest of the book. Irene’s partner Jude also seemed like a decent person who I’d have liked to see more of in this book. As far as queer representation in books go, this is…fine.
Which brings me to the theme of climate change. The world in this book is one where it rains all the time and vast portions of the city are flooded with rising water levels, power outages, housing displacement and all the rest of the issues that come with constant flooding. This to me at least is a pretty obvious reference to climate change.
My confusion here is – what is the author trying to say with this? Is the continuous rain and flooding in this book supposed to be a metaphor for grief and loss? Or is it supposed to depict the absurdity of having to live, work, play, and cry all while the rest of the world falls apart?
“I don’t think so,” Stephanie says, and seems sincere as she says it. “I think we all have to live our own lives. We can’t constantly be comparing things that happen to us to worse things happening all over the place.”
page 101
I think it is the latter because the book occasionally hints that is what its supposed to be. Of all the themes in Private Rites the climate change theme seems to be the most hazy and underdeveloped. So I’m not sure what interpretation of the apocalyptic nature of the world the author intended.
The King Lear of it All
Private Rites is supposed to be a speculative fiction reimagining of the Shakespearean tragedy King Lear. This is the second time I have run into a reimagining of that particular play. The first was Akira Kurosawa’s movie Ran (1985). I still haven’t read that King Lear and I don’t think I have any intention of doing so anytime in the foreseeable future.
That said, as far as I am aware of the general plot of the play, Private Eyes is farther away from the plot of King Lear than Ran was. The three sisters of the play are present but the rest of the framework of the play doesn’t exist in this plot. This book to me feels very loosely related to that play and in fact if this comparison was not made in the book’s description on Storygraph I would not have thought to be a reimagining of a Shakespearean tragedy at all.
Concluding Thoughts
Having written this review, I am still not quite sure how I feel about this book as a whole. I thought that most of its themes were executed reasonably well but the unlikable characters make it so that I find it difficult to form a strong connection with the book and the framing device of the apocalyptic world left me feeling a strong undercurrent of uncertainty. The ending of the book did not help matters – I am still not sure what that ending was trying to do or say.
I’ll give credit where its due, this book is intriguing and I do enjoy reading a book that leaves my thoughts in a unsettled state that I then have to slowly process. At least every once in a while. I don’t think I can read books like these all too often and I am looking forward to returning to the more familiar haunts of fantasy and science fiction with the next few books.
That’s all I’ve got for y’all. See y’all in the next one.
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