Sexy segueways, Freudian complexes and bad times on the canal, we could only be discussing the 2018 Man Booker shortlisted debut novel Everything Under by Daisy Johnson. What is the bonak? Can we ever avoid our fate? What will our booksellers David Bloomfield, Julie Danskin and Jonathan Taylor make of it? 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.