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Book Title

Everything Under

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Daisy Johnson
Body
The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries.

One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it.

In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.
 

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-826-6
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
280
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen
 

About the Author

Daisy  Johnson
Credit: Matthew Bradshaw
Daisy Johnson is the author of the short story collection Fen and the novel Everything Under, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. She is the winner of the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in Oxford, England, by the river.
 
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Praise

  • Everything Under is a force of nature. . . . Johnson carries on this grand tradition by making something very old uncannily new.”The New York Times Book Review
  • “Entrancing. . . . Johnson’s own writing summons the just-off-ness of the uncanny; she is capable of passages of exquisite creepiness. . . . Her sentences have an aqueous quality.”—The New Yorker
  • “Skillful and imaginative. . . . It takes a bold mind to steer so many elements through one tale, and an even stronger stylist to render them in a narrative that heeds, but seems not to, the laws of nature. Johnson has done all this in a book that will probably be read . . . for years to come as a part of the reclaiming of narrative territory.”—The Boston Globe
     
  • “Johnson is one of her generation’s most intriguing authors. . . . She fits us into tapestries of her own making—holding up a mirror to us before shattering and reassembling it.”—Entertainment Weekly
     
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