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Everything Under

Everything Under

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Summary

'Weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling... Dive in for just a moment and you'll emerge gasping and haunted' Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

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

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018**

Reviews

  • Johnson attacks the Oedipus myth with a taste for gothic horror and a radical vision based on gender fluidity ... Her clever layering of ancient and modern makes for a disturbing take on the illusion of free will and the horrible things that women sometimes think and do.
    The Times

About the author

Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.
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