'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**

Everything Under was not a winner for NUBClub -- almost everyone gave it a middling score (from just above average to just below) when asked to rate it. The reason why it worked or didn’t for any given member varied greatly. Essentially, the pieces of the story didn't come together for us into a cohesive whole, but different readers found different parts palatable. Most of us thought the narrator Gretel was a stronger part of the work, as she made her dissociative way through finding and then caring for her mentally declining mother. One of the strongest things in the novel was the depicting of the mother in the throes of dementia, although the harshness of that depiction turned off several of us. Others gravitated to the Margo story, but there were a lot of troubling questions in it. In particular, we challenged what the author was saying about Margo's transition and we argued a bit about whether Margo's relationship with Fiona was a believable hero worship or a convenient plot point. We found the river culture where Gretel and her mother lived to be compelling (it reminded many of an English Beasts of the Southern Wild), but what exactly was going on with the Bonak, a central symbol in the story, was deeply unclear. Was it a fantasy idea that served as the embodiment of all of their fears? If so, was Gretel hallucinating when her mother kills it on the shore? But then what did Margo see while she was fishing? Was it an alligator or something like that? If so, how does that make any sense given the location and climate? It was unclear in a way that left us unsatisfied. But all of this paled in the face of the biggest issue -- the Oedipal reference. Fiona acting as Cassandra to drive Margo out of the house, Margo's father becoming blind for no real reason, the mother wandering the country in search of something. It was all just too literal. We couldn't figure out why Johnson needed that structure. There was an interesting story with Margo's self-discovery and an interesting story with the mother's illness. It just seemed like the Oedipal structure was a duct tape to hold those elements together, but rather than create a seamless whole, the tape just stood out as a tacky and pretentious overreach that the book would have been better without. Ultimately, no one really wanted to defend the novel beyond a couple of nice points. We all could find something we liked in Everything Under, but most of us couldn't say we liked the novel as a whole.