The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. To find her mother, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals, facing all that she has ever feared. Everything Under – a surreal debut novel, is a daring and gnarled literary fiction of doomed mother-daughter relationships, which goes all out to portray womanhood as a trap. In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth Oedipus, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships.