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  • Published: 19 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784702113
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

Everything Under



An electrifying debut novel from one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary fiction

'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**

  • Published: 19 February 2019
  • ISBN: 9781784702113
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

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, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

Also by Daisy Johnson

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Praise for Everything Under

Hypnotic, disquieting and thrilling. A concoction of folklore, identity and belonging which sinks its fangs into the heart of you.

Irenosen Okojie

Everything Under seeped through to my bones. Reaching new depths hinted at in Fen, language and landscape turn strange, full of creeping horror and beauty. It is precise in its terror, and its tenderness. An ancient myth masterfully remade for our uncertain times.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

[Daisy Johnson's] first collection Fen drew comparisons to Angela Carter and Graham Swift and there is an otherworldly, folkloric tinge to her inventive first novel although it is set in modern-day, rural England... Beautiful.

Alice O'Keeffe, Bookseller *Editor's Choice*

Everything Under grabbed me from the first page and wouldn’t let me go. To read Daisy Johnson is to have that rare feeling of meeting an author you’ll read for the rest of your life.

Evie Wyld

Surprising, gorgeously written, and profoundly unsettling, this genderfluid retelling of Oedipus Rex will sink into your bones and stay there.

Carmen Maria Machado

Everything Under is an unusual and eerily atmospheric read from new talent Daisy Johnson.

Good Housekeeping

Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction

Lauren Groff

A deeply involving, unsettling novel that pulls the reader into a uniquely eerie yet recognisable world.

Sunday Times

Johnson excels at making psychic phenomena feel visceral.

Observer

Encompassing myth, fairy tale and haunting language, Johnson's earthy and timeless depictions of gender and sexuality turn an old tale into something entirely current.

New Statesman

[Daisy Johnson’s] first novel confirms not only her talent, but her ambition… Johnson’s dense, begrimed retelling [of the Oedipus myth] hums with an electricity pylon-charge of danger, and her sentences repeatedly flare with startling, visceral coinages.

Daily Mail

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

Impressive.

Daily Telegraph

A fantastically dark reinvention of the myth of Oedipus… a complicated but deeply satisfying novel.

Stylist

I was quite late into work because I couldn’t stop reading it.

Claire Armitstead, Guardian Books Podcast

A stunning debut novel. Blending a deep understanding of character and storytelling examination… the result reminds me of Iris Murdoch… Johnson’s affinity for the natural world is extraordinary

Jeff VanderMeer, Guardian

Everything Under is otherworldly and captivating… a book that is as beautifully human as it is delightfully strange.

Caught by the River

A hybrid of Alexander Trocchi’s 1954 murder-on-a-canal novel Young Adam and Angela Carter at her most witchy and far-out, Everything Under is creative writing of distinction.

Ian Thomson, Evening Standard

Explores femininity, family and identity with a timeline and narrators that eddy and clash like sticks thrown into a river... like a current, it soon carries you away.

Natalie Bowen, Scotsman

Imaginative and innovative... there is a spellbinding tension. As the threads move towards a common end, you’re a child who wants to know the magic.

Jonathan McAloon, Irish Times

Infused with dark fairy tale, Oedipal tragedy and Freudian desire, this is a brambly, atmospheric and immersive tale… Johnson’s [Everything Under] shines in its use of language.

Ellen Wiles, Times Literary Supplement

This is a thrilling novel… Like Daisy Johnson’s startling debut, the short-story collection Fen, this lyrical, multi-layered novel explores her deep love and understanding of the natural world and shadowy people eking out a living close to it. She writes beautifully and vividlywith a brooding atmosphere that draws the reader into an uncanny and menacing watery world. It is exquisitely written, but very affecting.

Rebecca Wallersteiner, Lady

A weird and wonderful revisioning of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex… Johnson writes with a mesmerising blend of the naturalistic and the surreal, spinning physical descriptions of muscular beautyThis is a novel that drives to its tragic outcome with the twisting but unstoppable logic of a river to the sea.

Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times

A triumph: a novel that feels inexorable, messy and profound all at once.

Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman

Saturated in mythology and fairy tales, Everything Under is weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling. Daisy Johnson writes in a torrent of language as unrelenting and turbulent and dark as the river at the book’s heart; dive in for just a moment and you’ll emerge gasping and haunted

Celeste Ng

I’m under the spell of an extraordinary bookEverything Under [is] a gift from a wise and empathetic friend who understands the gypsy gift of storytelling – to transcend and enthral.

Laura Bailey, Vogue

As readable as it is dazzling, full of unsettling twists and dark revelations

Alex Preston, Observer

A formally ambitious novel with a thriller’s heart and intimate attention to the power of language.

Vanity Fair

Everything Under is a force of nature ... 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 left unsaid.

Tobias Grey, New York Times Book Review

The kind of book that worms its way into your brain, leaving echoes of its story and world long after it is back on the shelf… beautifully creepy and affecting

Rebecca Nicholson, Observer

A thrillingly bewildering reading experience. It often seems like you’re feeling your way submerged, from paragraph to paragraph, rather than safely strapped in for a conventionally neater narrative ride… What lurks beneath is literary fiction at its troublesome best.

Sarah Hensway, Waterways World

Barbed, gripping and marvellously written.

Mark Hudson, Tablet, *Summer Reads of 2021*