A Matter of Imagination

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  • Reading notes – “Our Wives Under The Sea”, by Julia Armfield

    What you have to understand, she says, is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.

    This single sentence, found on the very first page, completely hooked me. This is a deeply unsettling novel, heavy with existential dread and a claustrophobia that makes it simultaneously difficult to read but difficult to stop. I found myself completely unable to put it down and devoured it in a single sitting.

    Be warned the below contains some spoilers

    Summary

    Leah is a marine biologist whose three-week deep-sea research mission goes terribly wrong, leaving her and her crew stranded at the bottom of the ocean for six months. When she finally returns home, her wife, Miri, notices immediately that the woman who returned is not the same woman who left. Leah is distant, physically changing, and leaking salt water. As Miri struggles to understand what happened at the bottom of the ocean, she is also desperately trying to save the woman she loves.

    Structure and Perspective

    The novel has a dual-perspective, dual-timeline structure.  

    Miri’s POV (the present): Miri’s narrative is deeply emotional, nostalgic, and tender. She talks about the devastating reality of Leah’s change, contrasting the present with the vibrant, bubbly woman she married. There is a clear parallel between Miri’s current caregiving grief and her past trauma of losing her mother to a degenerative illness, as well as Miri’s own lurking hypochondria. 

    Leah’s POV (the past): Leah’s chapters talk about the claustrophobic nightmare of being trapped on the ocean floor. This thread is a masterclass in psychological horror and cosmic dread, tracking the slow breakdown of the submarine’s crew and the eerie, inexplicable phenomena they encounter in the deep.

    Writing, Plot, and Themes

    You can often tell when an author is trying too hard to be profound, but Armfield’s prose flows organically here. Aside from a few clunky sentences and slightly underdeveloped secondary characters, I found the writing beautiful and deeply poetic. (My heart is a thin thing, these days – shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs)

    The plot moves slowly, but that’s intentional. This slow pace works perfectly here, as it gradually builds psychological pressure like water depth. Armfield reinforces this by naming the book’s sections after actual oceanic depth zones: the abyssal, the hadal, etc. As the book goes on, the vibe shifts from psychological dread straight into body horror. It leans heavily into themes of water, blood, and teeth to show Leah’s physical transformation, and that’s where I found some of my favourite quotes:

    • In the days immediately following her return, blood would rise unheeded through her pores, so that sometimes I’d come in and find her pincushioned, dotted red as if pricked with needles;
    • Leah is there and the bed is soaking and it takes me longer than it should do, even in the darkness, to realise the water is coming from her;
    • One of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semi-solid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made of pure water

    Final Thoughts

    I did think maybe the book could’ve benefitted from another 50 pages or so, because some things felt slightly rushed in the sequence of Leah’s return. I wish we knew more about the mechanics of “the Centre”, like who was behind it, why they abandoned the crew, and what was the purpose of it all. Ultimately, though, the book aims to be a metaphor for terminal illness and grief, so I believe the choice to focus on the characters’ internal landscapes rather than the logistics of their trauma was probably intentional. Overall, this was a great read and I thought it did a great job of capturing what it means to grieve someone standing right in front of you.

  • Reading notes – “To the East of the East”, by Ping Lu

    Disclosure: This was an advanced copy I was given access to on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The book is due to come out in UK in November 2026. The review below contains mild spoilers.

    Initial thoughts

    To the East of the East follows Min-Hui, a Taiwanese woman searching Beijing for her missing husband. While the book promises a poignant reflection on marriage, personal freedom, and the tumultuous geopolitical relationship between Taiwan and the PRC, the execution ultimately fails to land. The novel’s core message becomes entirely lost beneath a convoluted framing narrative, jarring prose, and flat characterisation, and while the momentum picks up marginally in the final 30-40 pages, a reader should not have to endure the vast majority of a book to feel invested.

    Structural Framework

    I found the narrative structural choices to severely hinder the book’s pacing. The plot is split into three competing threads: Min-Hui’s present journey in Beijing, letters from her missing husband (Chien-I), and excerpts from a novel-in-progress written by Min-Hui herself. The latter focuses on a young Qing emperor and pirate Zhang Zhilong, his prisoner.

    Of the three, Chien-I’s letters are the most compelling, though they still suffer from major issues. Min-Hui herself is a passive, flat protagonist whose profound lack of agency makes for a truly frustrating reading experience, especially because there is no growth. Her embedded historical meta-narrative, with the emperor and the pirate, is tedious and poorly constructed, and if I were a generous reader, I might assume the weak prose of these chapters was a stylistic choice to reflect Min-Hui’s own limitations as a writer, but alas, the surrounding text suggests otherwise.

    Prose and Translation

    I found the writing pretty immature overall, an issue that is most likely compounded by a clunky translation. The prose frequently relies on bizarrely constructed, non-sequitur logic and overly dramatic similes. A few examples:

    • She liked the heft of the rice cooker pot, its metallic gleam which made her think of the word cauldron – rice bubbling in a cauldron, as she inhaled its fragrance and decided that life was meaningful whether or not she had a man by her side.
    • This was her preferred hang-out, even though she didn’t drink coffee. Just as she liked to buy cups and saucers with cats on them, even though she didn’t have a cat. 
    • What an odd phrase, “conditional redundancy.” It means to resign with preferential conditions, but her mind went to weather conditions 

    Other descriptions, like comparing the “musty aroma of rice” to “a caress”, disrupt the immersion. One of my biggest book pet peeves is being treated as if I’m stupid as a reader. Here, too, the author frequently treats the reader with a degree of condescension, inserting ham-fisted exposition to state the obvious. For example, when the pirate merchant is trying to entertain the young emperor with his tales, we are told that “Zhang was well aware his story was bait”. Yes, well, so were we. 

    Continuity and Exposition Flaws

    The book is also undermined by glaring continuity errors and by relying heavily on telling rather than showing. Characters suddenly develop traits out of nowhere. Shangjun’s previously unmentioned swearing and stutter are suddenly introduced late in the book as if they were established patterns. Small inconsistencies, such as Min-Hui saying her husband was strictly allergic to alcohol only to later describe him as someone who “couldn’t hold his liquor”, are less glaring, but bothered me nonetheless.

    However, the most egregious thing to me were the author’s intrusions used in an attempt to explain away plot holes or deliver historical lectures. In his letters, Chien-I anticipates the reader’s objections to his seeming inability to call Min-Hui (“I know you’re thinking I could get a phone card. And yes, there are other phones on the island”), but never actually addresses them. More frustratingly, the historical fiction chapters frequently break into didactic addresses to the reader. A more skilled writer would have woven this context naturally into the world-building but instead, the author relies heavily on secondary characters to explicitly spell out the parallels between the historical fiction and Min-Hui’s actual life. Like when she tells Shangjun “You’re not familiar with 17th-century history, are you?” and then proceeds to give context for her novel, very obviously for the readers’ sake. Or when Shangjun interrupts the narrative flow to claim that “The reader will find this hilarious. The writer is telling her own story” (I can attest that I did not, in fact, find it hilarious).

    Final Verdict

    Ultimately, To the East of the East is a frustrating reading experience. What could have been a nuanced exploration of cross-strait identity and personal grief is instead brought down by structural flaws and erratic inconsistent prose.

  • Reading notes – “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead”, by Olga Tokarczuk

    Everyone and their mother has been raving about this book since it made Dua Lipa’s book club list last year, and I have to admit the gushing had put me off a little, so this poor book has been on my self for more than a year now, waiting to be cracked open. So so happy I finally did.

    On the surface, this is a murder mystery with an unreliable narrator, so the premise is already pretty great. However, there are many layers to this book and it’s been really fun annotating and unpicking some of these.

    Please be warned that the notes below include spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

    Summary

    Janina Duszejko is a woman in her 60s living in rural Poland, in a remote mountain cabin, with only a few neighbours (I believe she mentions 7 other houses in the vicinity, most of which are unoccupied for the better part of the year). She keeps herself busy by looking after the little hamlet, walking in the forest, reading horoscopes, and trying to banish hunters from the area. She is very attached to animals and believes that hunting is a crime, so she is in a perpetual conflict with a group of local hunters. When some of them start dying under suspect circumstances, Janina believes animals are finally taking their revenge. She’s trying to tell this much to the police and to plead for clemency for the animal murderers, but nobody is taking the “old bitty” seriously.

    Women’s voice

    I absolutely love that the narrator in this story is an older woman. I think older women haven’t had enough of a voice in literature, and they’re typically assigned matronly roles, where they become the voice of wisdom for younger characters. So here we have an older childfree woman who lives alone and tends to her own house, as well as her neighbours’, and who fearlessly confronts the local police, the local community, and even the priest, for what she believes is right. Love that!

    There is also considerable commentary on power dynamics and how older women are perceived and treated by society. Most people dismiss Janina as a “crazy old woman” and don’t take her concerns seriously, nor do they think she poses a danger to anyone. Even when she goes to the police to express concerns about activity she perceives to be dangerous and illegal in the local area, the staff try to intimidate her, they mock her, and eventually physically lead her out of the building. Her helplessness bleeds off the page and it is genuinely frustrating to read at times.

    Loneliness and isolation

    This is a major theme throughout the book. Janina describes her “little hamlet” as isolated and her life seems pretty solitary to begin with. There is no mention of family, children or partner, not even friends. She says the neighbours avoid her and don’t like her. However, as the story progresses, we get to see that’s not entirely true. She gradually starts mentioning people close to her: Dizzy – a former student who visits her every week for dinner and sometimes spends the weekend; Good News – a young woman at a local shop who Janina visits when she’s in town; Oddball – her neighbour who Janina initially says hates her, but actually is quite polite and frequently invites her over for tea or approaches her for help. She even has a job, which she doesn’t mention until a few chapters in. So it begs the question – is Janina genuinely lonely or is her isolation more self-imposed or even the result of a skewed perception of the reality around her and a sign of paranoia?

    Nature and astrology

    There is a strong connection between Janina and nature. She obviously respects nature and animals very much, to the point she suggests the forester to stop cutting trees down because bugs live in their trunks. She is furious at hunters and people who support them, and believes animals have souls and that hunting should be treated as we would any other murder. A lot of time is spent on reading horoscopes and talking about astrology. I am rather clueless about it, so unfortunately any potential symbolism was lost on me there. I did read some reviews which said the astrology was quite accurate, though. I am not entirely sure what that means in the context of what is considered to be a pseudo-science but that’s not for me to decide, I suppose. I did think that maybe Janina’s fixation with astrology and her determination to explain events around her by using star charts was perhaps a way for her to regain and/or keep control on her life, to make sense of what was going on around her.

    Plot

    This was a bit of a rollercoaster. Initially, I was on the fence about it and it took me a couple of chapters to get into it. Once it gripped me, though, it didn’t let me go and I found it hard to put the book down. Similarly, at times I thought the plot was going down a rather predictable way and I was convinced I knew what was going on, but then I was made to doubt myself, and when I was eventually proven partially right, I still had no idea how it would all end. So overall, I’d say Tokarczuk did a good job of keeping me on my toes and unlike most murder mysteries, this one managed to surprise me in places. To be completely honest, I think the writing was so good and the characters so compelling, that even if I’d guessed the plot early on and had no doubt about it, I’d have enjoyed the journey of seeing things to the end.

    Main character

    Lastly, Janina was a big reason why I enjoyed this book. She is a fantastic morally ambiguous character and downright unlikeable at times, but overall easy to empathise with. She is clearly mentally unwell and there are some hints to past issues which she conveniently glosses over, still I couldn’t help but admire her gumption, her fearlessness, and her sense of justice (with some exceptions to that, of course).

    I don’t really rate books, the star system eludes me, but I would recommend this book if you like unreliable narrators, morally grey character, unconventional women, and themes of isolation and societal power structures. It reminded me a little of “Death in her hands” by Ottessa Moshfegh.

  • Reading notes – Dept of Speculation, by Jenny Offill

    It’s very rare that I open a book and I know from the very first sentence that I’m going to love it. The Dept of Speculation was one such book.

    Be warned that my notes below contain some spoilers. I generally try to avoid these, but in this case, I thought the plot was less interesting than the form, so I don’t feel I’m doing other readers a disservice by spoiling certain details.

    The story of a marriage

    This is the story of a marriage as told by the “wife” (unnamed). The story itself feels very familiar. Woman has ambitions, but then falls in love, gets married, has a baby, and those ambitions are set aside for more practical things, like raising a child and having a joyless job that pays well enough. We probably all know where this is going – the husband ends up cheating with a younger woman. It’s such a cliche at this point, it’s almost mundane, banal. Who amongst us, women, hasn’t heard this story before, from our friends, mothers, sisters, colleagues, if we haven’t lived it ourselves?

    However, the beauty of the book is in the way the story unfolds. This is not a typical novel structure. The story is told through vignettes, these little fragments of thoughts and events, that can feel rather disjointed and random at first glance, but collectively they weave this narrative that pulls you in and holds surprising depth. 

    A new term – art monster

    The book coins the term “art monster” which I really love, and it defines it as this archetype of a person with the singular focus on creating art, in a selfish and almost obsessive way. And of course, historically, men were the ones who were afforded the luxury of pursuing their genius without concerning themselves with raising children or managing the household. Offill references this and says “Nabokov never opened his own umbrella. Vera licked all his stamps”

    So we follow this unnamed woman, who wanted to be an art monster – a writer – but then got married instead and had a baby girl and had to focus on her family. There is obviously some regret there, but for the most part, the wife seems content with her choices. She loves her child and her husband. She talks about other women who are unhappy in their marriages, about the mummy gossip on the playground and how other women complain about their husbands, and she feels lucky that her husband is seemingly better than these other men. 

    Stylistic choices

    Once the husband’s affair is revealed, the narration moves from first person to third person, but we still follow the wife and her perspective, so the change in narrators is obviously used to show her detachment from the husband, and this gap that opened between them.

    When it comes to the affair, there is no dramatic confrontation or confession. There’s very little dialogue, even. It is all revealed through small moments and gestures, almost intuitively – you know what is happening or what’s about to happen, without explicitly being told. Offill describes the way the air changes when they skirt around the subject, or the look in his eyes before he nods in answer to her question.

    Commentary on womanhood and motherhood

    There was a scene that really jumped at me, when the wife tells a friend about the affair. Her friend can’t believe it and says “but he’s the kindest person I know”, so the wife wonders if it was her fault. She reckons that if he is so kind and so good, maybe she ruined him enough to get him to do something so cruel. It’s just another subtle commentary on womanhood and some of the emotional burdens we take on ourselves. I particularly love the quote here – “So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind, and ungood, and untrue him?”

    Motherhood is depicted realistically and it’s rather endearing. The woman’s love for her baby is obvious even in those moments where motherhood is frustrating and thankless and painful. She talks about her baby screaming constantly and only calming down when she walks her outside, at speed (“If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again”). There is the boring aspect of motherhood, too (“What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing”) and that endearing part of motherhood where you can’t get enough of your baby (“That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it”)

    Why did I love this?

    What I liked most about the book is that it felt like a lot of the story was happening in what wasn’t being said, almost like negative space – which can feel a bit gimmicky, but I thought it was well done here. So Offill will describe the atmosphere in a room, people’s gestures, and their expressions, and they all point to one thing, which is never named, and the absence of it highlights that thing even more. 

    I thought it was a unique read and it flows really smoothly, even with this disjointed structure. It can easily be read in one or two sittings, but although it’s so compact, there’s quite a bit to take away from it.

    Let me know if you’ve read it and what you thought about it, especially the ending, because I disagreed with most opinions I read about it. And if you haven’t, I hope I’ve convinced you to do it, I don’t think you’ll regret it.