India, July 19 -- Tiny excerpt: It has been so many years. of almost this. It rains constantly and. the rain's whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets. of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors. and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It's exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one's attention - exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. It hasn't stopped raining in Britain. In years. Rivers have swallowed roads, neighbourhoods have disappeared; and people have simply learnt to live with the deluge. Against the backdrop of this larger disaster, in Julia Armfield's Private Rites (2024), a family is falling apart. Isla, Irene and Agnes's father has died. A celebrated, charismatic architect, Stephen Carmichael was master builder to the elite. The sisters, largely estranged, have memories of a cold and emotionally manipulative man. Now, they are forced back into his floating-on-pylons mansion, where buried resent-ments and fractured memories resurface. Loosely inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, the novel unfolds as an interrogation of what it means to endure collapse day after day; as well as loss, grief and trauma, in a world that refuses to stop drowning....