- Published: 19 February 2019
- ISBN: 9781784702113
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 272
- RRP: $22.99
Everything Under
- Published: 19 February 2019
- ISBN: 9781784702113
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 272
- RRP: $22.99
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 vividly… with 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 beauty… This 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 book… Everything 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*