Everything Under

Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries in a life she keeps mostly to herself. Words have mattered to her since childhood, when she lived on a canal boat with her mother and the two of them made up a language that belonged only to them.

She last saw her mother at sixteen, and the memories have worn thin. A phone call from a hospital ends her isolation and raises questions from long ago. The private vocabulary of those years starts to return, along with the wild seasons on the river.

Other memories surface too. One winter a lonely, odd boy stayed aboard the boat with them. And in the water there was a creature, perhaps a canal thief, swimming upstream and drawing nearer. Gretel's path leads back to where she began.

The novel is set in a modern-day England that most readers will not know, and it reworks classical myth. It moves between Gretel's present and her childhood on the water. The tone is eerie and unsettling, with themes of family, identity, language and fate carried through a story about a mother and daughter. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018.