Name: Everything Under
ISBN: 9781785417115

Daisy Johnson

As a child, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn't seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though - almost a lifetime ago - and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. But a phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel's isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the strange lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water - a canal thief? - swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end, there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back...

Everything Under

gill

you say only that there is no escaping, that the way we will end up is coded into us from the moment we are born and that any decisions we make are only mirages, ghosts to convince us of free will. 

But sometimes I wonder if you are right and if all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.

When she slept that night the man she had killed was in her dreams and she could not get him out. He was there all through the next day too, behind her eyelids, his face flashing up and then receding like the afterburn of a dying bulb. 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen 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.

A Novel

if I could write I would want to write like Daisy Johnson. her descriptions were not so much read as they were Felt. i forgive her for not using quotation marks (big!!)

Jules 

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** 'Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction.' Lauren Groff Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn't seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though - almost a lifetime ago - and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel's isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water - a canal thief? - swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back. Daisy Johnson's debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.

Patrick Book

Interesting enough from a story standpoint, but the style of it irked me. It’s a personal thing, and I don’t understand it, but I have a real mental block about books where dialogue isn’t properly punctuated. I have a hard time keeping things straight!

azliana aziz

the case of too much of everything that in turns made motherfucjer of a jumbled up narrative--- ultimately left one hell of a great deal to be desired.

4.5 stars. My mind is still blown after finishing this. It was extremely good! It deserves to win the Man Booker Prize it was nominated for

Sonja H

Ich finde es sehr schwierig, dieses Buch zu rezensieren, das mich einerseits fasziniert, andererseits aber auch enorm gefrustet hat.

"Everything Under" soll in erster Linie eine Neuerzählung der Ödipusgeschichte sein, verwebt aber deutlich mehr Mythen und Märchen und steckt voller Andeutungen.

Allem liegt die Frage zugrunde: Warum hat Sarah ihre Tochter im Alter von 16 Jahren verlassen?

Diesem Geheimnis geht Gretel auf die Spur, als sie versucht, ihre Mutter zu finden. Dabei lernen wir jede Menge weitere Charaktere kennen, die nie einfach einzuordnen sind.
Alle Figuren in diesem Buch sind vielschichtig, undurchschaubar und tragen mehr zur Verwirrung als zur Auflösung des Rätsels bei.

Daisy Johnson hat ohne Frage einen sehr atmosphärischen Roman entworfen, der viele Fragen aufwirft, der zum Nachdenken anregt, mit Symbolik experimentiert und durchaus gut unerhält.
Allerdings habe ich immer und immer wieder den roten Faden verloren, habe Figuren verwechselt, da ihre Story nicht immer klar gekennzeichnet ist und mich im Dickicht der Erzählstränge verloren.

Auch dies ist ein Buch, dem ich irgendwann wohl eine zweite Chance geben werde, das mich aber momentan etwas überfordert.

Beautiful writing. Read it in basically one sitting. A strong and crystallized start and end. But the middle verges on incomprehensible fairly often.

Autumn 

This was a wonderful read. I made the huge mistake of reading the description here on Goodreads before reading the book which I think almost ruins it as it gives important information away. Because I knew, I was chasing it throughout the book and it affected my reading BUT it was still a great read and I was wholely unsettle by the end. 
I really enjoyed reading this novel and now I need a break!

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Everything Under tells us the story of Gretel as she revisits a childhood almost forgotten. On an isolated canal boat with her mother Gretel grew up speaking a language peppered with invented words and strange uncertainties. When Gretel was sixteen her mother disappeared without a word and after years of fruitless searching they have been reunited and Gretel tries to unravel the truth of their hazy shared past, including Marcus, a young runaway who spent a winter with them on the water. 

Gretel’s battles with her own imperfect understanding of this past and with her mother’s intransigence and encroaching dementia provides some powerful and moving moments but unfortunately, the Oedipal current that’s runs through the narrative felt forced and unwieldy so that I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to believe Marcus’s part of the story.

The structure is fragmented as we drift from character to character, decoding the narrators from the style and context of each chapter. This kind of puzzle-solving is one of my favourite styles, you can learn so much about a character if you have to engage with them on this kind of level. The problem was the voice. A change in voice can be a powerful tool in a narrative, but only if it has a constructive effect on the reader. I couldn’t grasp the significance in the constant shifts from first to second person and it seemed a largely meaningless affectation, particularly when there seemed to be little that really distinguished the internal voices of the characters.

The dreamy, slightly eerie tone was pretty at times but this misty sort of narrative, particularly when coupled with the mythological themes and uncertain memory of the characters felt like something I have read a hundred times before. The characters themselves were of that liminal, vaguely esoteric type so common in stories like this but they just lacked an edge and a plausibility that might have given the story a depth and potency that was lacking.

Shreerag Plakazhi

I struggled, and honestly, the struggle was not worth it.

jillian tenner

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 'Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction' Lauren Groff ‘Weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling... Dive in for just a moment and you’ll emerge gasping and haunted’ Celeste Ng It’s been sixteen years since Gretel last saw her mother, half a lifetime to forget her childhood on the canals. But a phone call will soon reunite them, and bring those wild years flooding back: the secret language that Gretel and her mother invented; the strange boy, Marcus, living on the boat that final winter; the creature said to be underwater, swimming ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but to wade deeper into their past, where family secrets and aged prophesies will all come tragically alive again. ‘As readable as it is dazzling, full of unsettling twists and dark revelations’ Observer

Everything Under

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