This week I’ve been enjoying Everything Under by Daisy Johnson.

Here’s the blurb:

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.

This story sucks you in from the very first page and refuses to let go. It takes you back in time, through muddled memories, fragmented families, isolation, fear and fate.

The book is even more engaging for me because it is set in and around Oxford; along the familiar waterways and in the city.

How would I sum up this book in one word?

Unsettling.