Under Everything by Daisy Johnson

This book was short listed for the Booker prize, and quite interesting.
The narrator of the book, Gretel Whiting, writes early on that “there are more beginnings than there are endings to contain them”: a crucial lesson about life and memory that shows us how to read this complex, uncompromising novel. Until she was 13, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother, Sarah. But she hasn’t seen her for 16 years, and her search for her mother pulls everything else in with it: past, present, future. It even affects her work in Oxford updating dictionary entries. She gets stuck on the word “break”, comparing her memories of Sarah to the task of defining awkward words. She checks morgues compulsively and revisits a flat she once shared with her mother.
The artfully eccentric mother-daughter relationship lies at the heart of the novel, surrounded by a thicket of men animated by their own cruelty, menace or uncertainty. They fall away and return in much the same way as the Bonak or "canal thief". There is a bit of the surreal, a bit of darkness, but in the end, a well structured and unusual tale.