A retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the insular community of the boat people who live along the canals of Oxford.Gretel was raised in the sole company of her mother, Sarah, on an engineless houseboat moored in a quiet part of the River Thames. Their relationship is intensely iconoclastic and isolated: They haul their own water, fish for much of their food, speak a language peppered with made-up words, school each other with entries from Sarah's encyclopedia. One winter, dogs, cats, and even children begin to go missing from the communities that live on the river. Sarah and 13-year-old Gretel believe it is the work of an uncanny creature they call the Bonak, and, with the help of a wandering boy named Marcus, they determine to trap and kill it. Now Gretel is an adult working as a lexicographer, and Sarahwho abandoned her into foster care 16 years earlierhas come back into her life in an even wilder and more unpredictable form. Sarah's phone call making contact sends Gretel on a quest into her own past: First to find Sarah, then to find Marcus, and finally to confront the Bonak, a creature made flesh by her and her mother's own fears. The book is structured in interwoven sections which alternate among Gretel's first-person perspective and the close-third-person narration of Sarah and Marcus, whose timelines take place in the past. As the truth about Marcus' identity becomes clearer, the haze that surrounds Saraha reimagining of Jocastadeepens. However, where the original tale focuses on the torment of Oedipus himself, here the mother's rage, her despair, and her progressive disassociation from the known world are the centerpieces of the story. Sarah's past leaves lurid scars across her daughter's psyche as the book delves into what it means to live in a world that binds us so cruelly to our fate. Johnson's (Fen, 2017) debut novel explores the determinism of its characters' choices even as it asserts the fluidity of their genders and their relationships with each other, in prose that harmonizes with the haunting wasteland of its settinga place where what is discarded takes on new identity if not new life.A tense, startling book of true beauty and insight. Proof that the oldest of stories contain within them the seeds of our future selves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize, this dreamy, unsettling, and vividly poetic first novel by the British author of the short story collection Fen (2017) takes off from the story of Oedipus, not following it slavishly but using the myth to deepen a sense of dread. The story unfolds in England over the past 30 years. In the present, thirtysomething narrator Gretel looks after her awful, wonderful, terrifying mother, Sarah, who is increasingly lost to dementia. The two lived with only each other as company in a boat on the River Isis near Oxford until Gretel was 13, and then in a little apartment above a stable in the country, until Sarah abandoned 16-year-old Gretel to the foster system. The novel moves slowly but inevitably toward unraveling the mystery of just what happened immediately before mother and daughter left their home on the river. Equally disturbing strands of the novel follow Gretel's present-day struggles with her mother, her recent search for her mother, her recovered memories of the past, and the mysterious journey of a girl named Margot. With its lyrical descriptions of a frightening landscape as well as the inner worlds of its confused characters, Everything Under demands and rewards close reading and rereading.--Margaret Quamme Copyright 2018 Booklist

Johnson's harrowing, singular first novel (following the story collection Fen) retells the myth of Oedipus Rex, putting a modern spin on a familiar tale. Gretel, a lexicographer in her early 30s, has finally been reunited with her mother, Sarah, after a long search. Sarah, now suffering from dementia, is far from the woman who left Gretel to the foster care system 16 years ago. Gretel's childhood prior to that had been carefree but insular, spent primarily with Sarah-"a wildish girl and her wilder mother"-on a houseboat in the canals of Oxford, where they spoke in a private language and were stalked by the Bonak, a monster that lived in the river by their home and represented, as Gretel defined it, "what we are afraid of." For a time, they'd been joined on the houseboat by a transgender boy named Marcus who had left the only home he'd ever known to escape a prophecy, crafting a new identity in the process. As secrets are uncovered (such as the truth of the prophecy that compelled Marcus to flee his home) and the consequences of past decisions reverberate into the present (such as the choice Sarah makes regarding her first pregnancy, before Gretel), Gretel realizes how close the Bonak they feared has been all along. This story about motherhood and self-determination is a stunning fever dream of a novel. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

DEBUT The quiet life of Gretel, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, is disrupted to its core when she receives a cryptic voicemail from the mother who abandoned her 16 years earlier. This startling event leads her to renew a search she had abandoned and takes her back to the time in her life when she lived with her mother on a riverboat. It also connects her to the family of Marcus, a young man who stayed with Gretel and her mother for a time and whose story may provide the necessary clue to the past and to her mother's present whereabouts. The story unfolds in several strands over different time periods, from Gretel's childhood with an eccentric mother who educated her from a set of encyclopedias and created a fanciful shared vocabulary, through the story of Marcus and his troubled early life, to the present, as Gretel eventually locates her mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's. VERDICT A haunting tale of children lost and parents found, this debut novel is a special treat for word lovers. [This book was originally scheduled for January 2019, but its publication was moved to October 2018 after it was short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize; see Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.-Ed.]-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston -Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

DAISY JOHNSON'S FIRST novel, "Everything Under," is a force of nature. Its narrative is slippery as an eel and tangled like the murky, wreckage-strewn waterways of its Oxfordshire setting. Its title, possibly by design, recalls the debut of another writer, also resident in Oxford, who went on to have a glittering career. Like Iris Murdoch's 1954 novel, "Under the Net," Johnson's Man Booker Prize finalist is concerned with language, secrets and the damage wrought by what's leftunsaid. Johnson, who at 27 became the youngest writer ever to reach the last round of the prestigious prize, also shares Murdoch's love of myth. In "Everything Under," she subverts Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" by expanding the marginal part of Jocasta. Sarah, as she is called here, is both linchpin and catalyst for the deterministic events that follow. She is described by her "enthralled" daughter, Gretel, as "like a preacher or the leader of a cult," but also as "a runner, a giver-upper." Gretel, who works as a lexicographer updating dictionary entries, is haunted by the way her mother abandoned her when she was a teenager. And she has spent the last 16 years fruitlessly trying to track her down. Ringing up the local morgues has become a habit: "Sometimes I thought that I kept doing it to make sure you were not coming back." The novel is built around three chapter headings that are repeated over and over: "The Cottage," "The River" and "The Hunt." The first of these is an isolated home where the adult Gretel has retreated to lick her wounds; the second is where mother and daughter lived on a houseboat for several years; and the third explains both Gretel's search for her mother and a ghoulish presence on the river that she and her mother refer to as the Bonak. This monster is sometimes glimpsed - "It is double-headed, has more limbs than it must need, flings in and out of the dull pockets of candlelight" - but is also a shared symbol foreboding tragedy and loss. The supernatural is something Johnson (who was born on Halloween) already explored to electrifying effect in her story collection, "Fen," which was set amid the flooded coastal plains of eastern England. In one story, a girl goes on a hunger strike and out of empathy metamorphosizes into an eel; in another, a house becomes furiously jealous of a woman's lovers. Johnson has a way of presenting these scenarios matter-of-factly, grounding the fantastic in the earthy details of country life. In her short stories and in "Everything Under," she portrays female characters less as mothers and wives than as fully fledged characters who aren't defined by any preconceived role. Sarah's sense of her own independence, which often involves ignoring social boundaries, precludes seeing her body as "a carrier, an appendage to something else." Yet, as Gretel points out, her mother is still hoodwinked by a certain type of male refinement: "Men who liked espressos, steak tartare, white chocolate macaroons; men who enjoyed subtitled films, who wrote in the margins of books then gave them to you to read after you'd had sex in their city flats or cabins in the woods or country houses with corridors like throats leading to doors you walked in and out of." There are other doors that open in "Everything Under," leading to places where gender is fluid. The Oedipal figure in Johnson's novel is Margot, a young girl who identifies as a boy and keeps her hair cut short and her breasts tightly bound. Hence Margot becomes Marcus the runaway, keeper of a murderous secret. For a while, he finds asylum with Sarah and Gretel on board their boat. But it is a sharp-edged refuge, predicated on a private language mother and daughter have invented to share only between themselves. The water "effs" along; everything that comes down the river is some kind of "sprung"; time spent alone is "sheesh" time; and being called a "harpiedoodle" is not a compliment. "Again and again I go back to the idea that our thoughts and actions are determined by the language that lives in our minds," Gretel muses. Without their private language, she believes, the terrifying Bonak might not exist. Johnson often employs unusual juxtapositions of language or imagery: "The rental car was red and the hospital seemed to be mostly a long corridor," or "The mass of birds rose up my throat, flooded out through my cracked jaw." Her dialogue is also distinguished by a complete absence of quotation marks. But far from being enervating, this helps to carry Johnson's narrative along, allowing it to flow like a river. The setting of "Everything Under" is primordial: Gretel wants to tell her mother that "we are determined by our landscape, that our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees." Johnson digs beneath the surface of her novel's pulsating landscape. The characters themselves embody it in unusual ways. "You were the messy river," Gretel says of Sarah. "You were the pines shedding bark in summer and the ground littered with my metal traps." In a 1962 article for the British magazine The Spectator, Iris Murdoch wrote that "the mythical is not something 'extra.' We live in myth and symbol all the time." In "Everything Under," Johnson carries on this grand tradition by making something very old uncannily new. TOBIAS GREY is a critic and writer in Gloucestershire, England.