Long Wave By Daisy Johnson review – a sublime novel of motherhood and loss

Covering three generations, this tangled story of secrets, childhood, abandonment and care might be her best work yetIn 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, plus a strange monster lurking in the depths. Before that, her short‑story collection Fen, with its blend of the uncanny and the workaday, was critically acclaimed. She has since written Sisters, a psychological horror that uses supernatural elements to explore sibling bonds and grief, and The Hotel, a series of seriously chilling interlinked ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, while it shares some of these hallmarks, is in many ways finer and more subtle: perhaps her strongest work yet.Long Wave is a story of three generations of mothers. As a small child Ori was found after being “abandoned” by her mother on a w