For Gretel, words have always been so important that as a child, she and her mother even invented a language that became their own. Gretel now works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries. She has not seen her mother since she was 16, when they lived in a boat on the Oxford canal. Memories of the past, long erased, suddenly return after one phone call: the last winter on the water, a mysterious runaway boy, a strange, elusive creature living on the river. “In the Deepest” is a challenging debut novel with a surreal, eerie atmosphere. He will not leave you indifferent.