Everything Under

DEBUT The quiet life of Gretel, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, is disrupted to its core when she receives a cryptic voicemail from the mother who abandoned her 16 years earlier. This startling event leads her to renew a search she had abandoned and takes her back to the time in her life when she lived with her mother on a riverboat. It also connects her to the family of Marcus, a young man who stayed with Gretel and her mother for a time and whose story may provide the necessary clue to the past and to her mother's present whereabouts. The story unfolds in several strands over different time periods, from Gretel's childhood with an eccentric mother who educated her from a set of encyclopedias and created a fanciful shared vocabulary, through the story of Marcus and his troubled early life, to the present, as Gretel eventually locates her mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's.