
Private Rites
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Hannah van der Westhuysen
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By:
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Julia Armfield
About this listen
“One of my favorite novels of the past few years.”—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation
From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world
It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.
The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.
©2024 Julia Armfield (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A Most Anticipated Book (Goodreads, LitHub, BookRiot, Bookish)
“Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, this characteristically eerie and emotive novel explores faith, legacy, and grief for loved ones and for the world as we know it.”—GQ
“[Armfield] is both poet and prophet of the watery and the queer and the channels connecting them…Seductive…Compelling…Brilliantly audacious.”—The Guardian
“As an Our Wives Under the Sea evangelist, I was absolutely foaming at the mouth for Private Rites...It’s gay and eerie and vibey and weird...Drink it up, baby!”—LitHub
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Story
Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife. Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation.
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Flat storyline with monotone narration
- By Julia on 01-02-25
By: Weike Wang
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Alter Ego
- A Novel
- By: Alex Segura
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Bustamante is a cultural force like none other: an acclaimed filmmaker, an author, a comic book artist known for one of the all time best superhero comics in recent memory. But she’s never been able to tackle her longtime favorite superhero, the Lethal Lynx. Only known to the most die-hard comics fans and long out of print, the rights were never available—until now. But Annie is skeptical of who is making the offer: Bert Carlyle's father started Triumph Comics, and has long claimed ownership of the Lynx
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A strong female main character
- By Ann on 02-11-25
By: Alex Segura
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I Might Be in Trouble
- By: Daniel Aleman
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.
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What a dumpster fire! (Grab some marshmallows, y’all…we’re makin’ S’Mores!)
- By Hans Christian Branderson on 12-12-24
By: Daniel Aleman
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What the Woods Took
- A Novel
- By: Courtney Gould
- Narrated by: Lindsey Dorcus
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Devin Green wakes in the middle of the night to find two men in her bedroom. No stranger to a fight, she calls to her foster parents for help, but it soon becomes clear this is a planned abduction—one everyone but Devin signed up for. She’s shoved in a van and driven deep into the Idaho woods, where she’s dropped off with a cohort of equally confused teens. Finally, two camp counselors inform them that they've all been enrolled in an experimental therapy program.
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great performance
- By H on 01-10-25
By: Courtney Gould
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Yours for the Taking
- A Novel
- By: Gabrielle Korn
- Narrated by: Jasmin Savoy Brown
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 2050. Ava and her girlfriend live in what's left of Brooklyn, and though they love each other, it's hard to find happiness while the effects of climate change rapidly eclipse their world. Soon, it won't be safe outside at all. The only people guaranteed survival are the ones whose applications are accepted to The Inside Project, a series of weather-safe, city-sized structures around the world.
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devoured this!!!
- By Jen Winston on 12-12-23
By: Gabrielle Korn
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The Book Censor's Library
- A Novel
- By: Bothayna Al-Essa, Ranya Abdelrahman - translator, Sawad Hussain - translator
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.
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The ending!
- By laurie on 01-29-25
By: Bothayna Al-Essa, and others
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Bittersweet in the Hollow
- By: Kate Pearsall
- Narrated by: Reagan Boggs
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In rural Caball Hollow, surrounded by the vast National Forest, the James women serve up more than fried green tomatoes at the Harvest Moon diner, where the family recipes are not the only secrets. Like her sisters, Linden was born with an unusual ability. She can taste what others are feeling, but this so-called gift soured her relationship with the vexingly attractive Cole Spencer one fateful night a year ago . . . A night when Linden vanished into the depths of the Forest and returned with no memories of what happened, just a litany of questions.
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Practical Magic meets A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder
- By Heather on 02-19-24
By: Kate Pearsall
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The Verifiers
- By: Jane Pek
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Claudia is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency.
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Loved!
- By Taylor on 03-01-22
By: Jane Pek
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The Knife and the Serpent
- By: Tim Pratt
- Narrated by: Zura Johnson, Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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After her grandmother is murdered in a home invasion, Tamsin Culver leaves her cushy programming job in San Francisco and returns to her Midwestern hometown to settle the estate. What she doesn't expect is to find out her grandmother's life-changing secret. She's not an Earth native but an exile from another level of the Nigh-Space continuum, an adjacent reality with technology far more advanced than ours. What's more, her grandmother ruled there as an oligarch, meaning Tamsin is the heir to vast wealth only accessible by someone from her bloodline.
By: Tim Pratt
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Remember You Will Die
- A Novel
- By: Eden Robins
- Narrated by: Henriette Zoutomou
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy.
By: Eden Robins
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The Rivals
- By: Jane Pek
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Claudia Lin—mystery novel superfan and, until recently, clichéd underemployed English major—has scored her dream job: co-running Veracity, a dating detective agency for chronically online New Yorkers who want to know if their prospective partners are telling the truth. Unfortunately, along the way, she and her colleagues—tech savant Squirrel, and the elegant and intimidating Becks—have uncovered a far-reaching AI conspiracy. And the corporate matchmakers may be resorting to murder to protect their secrets.
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Bloated writing
- By Kindle Customer on 12-20-24
By: Jane Pek
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Full Speed to a Crash Landing
- Chaotic Orbits, Book 1
- By: Beth Revis
- Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg, David Bendena
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew—and while they rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission. But Ada doesn’t care—all that matters to her is enjoying their fine food and sweet, sweet oxygen—until Rian White, the government agent in charge, starts to suspect that there’s more to Ada than meets the eye.
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I Am Really Hoping This Is The Start Of A Great New SciFi Series!!
- By BookDragonGirl on 08-16-24
By: Beth Revis
What listeners say about Private Rites
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Megs
- 02-26-25
Beautifully Written, But Mainly Fluff and Filler
Where to start? I want to give this book praise for everything it does well. Like everything Julia Armfield does, this book is gorgeously written in a way that brings you smack dab in the middle of the world and makes you forget reality. The sisters all feel real, grounded, and believable. Their flaws will resonate, and they feel like they could be your own family, struggling through life and love. But, unfortunately, that is the height of what this book does well. It is less a novel and more a snapshot of three sisters going through life at the end(?) of the world. The plot, while roughly that of King Lear, is basically non-existent. 90% of the book feels like filler and fluff, setting up back stories and side interests that ultimately don't mean a damn thing. The plot doesn't really exist, and is basically all rushed through in 1-2 chapters at end. And speaking of endings, Julia's works never really seem to end, just kind of stop. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just something to expect. In Our Wives Under The Sea, it helps fit the jarring changes of the characters and their lives. Here it really just felt lazy. All in all, it's a gorgeous piece of prose that lacks the substance it needs to be a true winner.
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- Hallie
- 01-15-25
sisters aren't always great
Prefacing this with the fact I have not read King Lear.
However, I really enjoyed this book. I think it captures growing up with sisters you love, but weren't particularly close to. How you feel loyal and connected to them, and yet can't quite bridge your gaps. I think the commentary of your family holding you to a past-you standard when everyone else knows the now-you is genius as well.
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- Shayne
- 01-28-25
Narration and writing was absolutely beautiful
This is one I wish I had read instead of listened to. Except it was such a beautiful listen. I think I missed a lot that I would have caught by reading.
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- Amybooksit
- 12-21-24
Outstanding ending
The first half had me concerned but the ending made the initial trudge well worth it
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- C. Stachnik
- 02-25-25
Never a sunshine, how is it possible to have so much bad weather
I found this very sad and depressing. Too much focus on the weather and water.
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- Betsy
- 12-15-24
Confusing
Terrible ending- completely confused. The story finally wraps up with 6 minutes remaining- and introduces a completely unfamiliar story line.
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