![]() ![]() Gretel has felt the presence of the Bonak her whole life, as well as its shifting identity in one breath, she says she thinks her mother has killed it, then snaps at a friend: “It’s anything … Last summer it was stupid dog.” Sarah is as mercurial and shape-shifting in memory as another liminal creature: the being known as the Bonak, or “canal thief”, whose presence the grim fishermen on the river mean when they say “things go missing in the night”. She checks morgues compulsively and revisits a flat she once shared with her mother. ![]() She gets stuck on the word “break”, comparing her memories of Sarah to the task of defining awkward words. It even affects her work in Oxford updating dictionary entries. But she hasn’t seen her for 16 years, and her search for her mother pulls everything else in with it: past, present, future. Until she was 13, Gretel lived on a canal boat with her mother, Sarah. ![]() The narrator, 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. ![]()
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