I have to admit I haven’t read all that much Shakespeare, so when I hear that a current work of fiction is a retelling of one of his classics, I’m not automatically interested in picking it up just on the basis of that. But Julia Armfield is one of my favorite contemporary authors — please check out her short story collection, salt slow, and her debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea — so her new book, described as a speculative reimagining of King Lear, was an immediate purchase for me. In Private Rites, the world is underwater and it rains endlessly. Society has built upward to survive, thanks
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