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#1730 of 8,085 books · #139 in Horror

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (2018) and the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel (2018).

As a child, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn't seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though - almost a lifetime ago - and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. But a phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel's isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the strange lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water - a canal thief? - swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end, there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back...

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Publisher
Jonathan Cape
ISBN-13
9781785417054

Awards

Other awarded books from Daisy Johnson