EVERYTHING UNDER by Daisy Johnson

Much like a stream or river meanders through channels, over stones, rocks, sweeping leaves, sticks, vegetation in its flow, this novel with a lot of its setting on the waterways around Oxford, wends and weaves its three main characters back and forth from past to present and back again. It is a most complex structure, a most strange story that is difficult to drag yourself away from. It is mesmerising, gently sucking the reader in under the surface. I found this unsettling and at times uncomfortable, but always intoxicating, taking me along in its stream.

Gretel is the primary narrator, a lexicographer, living alone, her unsettled and at times difficult childhood still haunting in her adulthood. Abandoned by her mother Sarah, she was brought up in the foster system, never seeing her mother again, despite constantly looking for her. One day contact is made and Gretel becomes her mother's carer now that dementia has set in. The intimacy and difficulty of their living together throws the past back in Gretel's face as she is forced to make sense of and come to terms with what happened all those years ago, when she and her mother lived on a barge. There is a third character in this too - a young boy, Marcus, who for a short period of time lived with mother and daughter, until one day he too simply disappeared.

The chapters are narrated in turn by Gretel in the present, Sarah in the past, and Marcus also in the past. There are other minor and shady characters - a boat man with whom Sarah takes up, and who would appear to be Gretel's father;  a mysterious mystical water monster type creature which haunts Gretel through her life, until she finds way to rid herself of it  forever; a woman who could be Marcus' mother; a clairvoyant who haunts another family connected to them all. There is no doubt it is complicated and unnerving. But somehow it all holds together, weaving these lives together, meandering through the years. Beautiful writing and an experience to read.