First published 2018
Gretel works alone, updating dictionary entries and avoiding her fractured past. When her long-disappeared mother suddenly reappears, Gretel must confront the strange winter years spent drifting on Oxford's canals—a time marked by a mysterious runaway boy and an ominous creature called the bonak. Her search will force her to reconstruct a private language and family mythology that she's spent years trying to forget. Memory becomes a dangerous territory where childhood secrets swim just beneath the surface, waiting to be recovered.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Oxford
264 pages · Paperback · Graywolf Press