Everything Under

Everything Under is a novel by the English writer Daisy Johnson, published in 2018. It was her first novel, and it retells a classical myth inside a story about a family that lived on the water.

Gretel is a lexicographer who spends her days correcting dictionary entries, and the work suits her. She grew up on a canal boat with her mother, in a private world that had its own words, and she has not seen her mother for the better part of a lifetime; the memories have been fading, which she has not minded.

The telephone call changes the arrangement. Gretel begins to remember the years they spent on the river, the boy who came to stay on the boat for a winter, and something in the water that seemed to be following them upstream. To find out what happened she has to go back to the places she has been avoiding, and the novel moves between the search in the present and the events that made it necessary, in a country that is recognisably England and not quite the England the reader knows.