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In 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 wild, uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of England. What happened to Ori’s mother, and why they fled to the island together, only for Ori to later be found and adopted by a scientist specialising in hares, is a question that returns to her with full force in adulthood when she finds herself newly postpartum and struggling to cope.

Ori’s mother is Ruth, whose witnessing at the age of 10 of an apparent suicide of a mother with her baby in a nearby river provides another mystery, for the police found no trace of either. And Ruth’s mother is Edith, who locked Ruth away because she couldn’t bear the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock.

These tangled relationships don’t always feel coherent; working out who’s who at the beginning of the novel can be confusing. A reader who is willing to sit with the uncertainty will be richly rewarded, however.

Johnson’s talent has always lain in her ability to combine vivid, poetic imagery that could have been wrenched from a myth or fairytale with writing that remains grounded in an almost mundane truthfulness. Here we find “mountain hares with thick white coats who have never seen a human even in their dreams”, a semi-derelict lighthouse that sits behind a forest of thorns, and a child bashing stones together to try to guide her mother back to her. In the hands of a lesser writer this could be whimsical or laboured, but Johnson juxtaposes such imagery with pavements that “are sticky with Calippo and crushed cigarettes” and blue NHS hospital curtains, “the rattle of the trolley on the linoleum”. The effect is sublime.

The specificity of her language around early motherhood is particularly striking. “The tiredness is like a suffocating, papery snow” – yes, it feels exactly like that. She has such a talent for pinning down those nebulous early impressions, from the fontanelle with its “immediacy of aliveness”, to the movement of a baby’s mouth as it dreams of milk, to nipple pain and breastfeeding (“she has the enormous sense that he is drinking all of her”). That our earliest relationships can come back to haunt us has long been a prominent theme. Here, too, Ori’s “ghostly, forgotten family [are] like intruders somewhere in the back of the house”, but in this novel the emotional scaffolding of her characters’ inner lives feels more robust, with less of a need for supernatural elements.

Johnson has always been interested in those living on the margins, in varying states of precarity, and here she is as concerned with surrogate and adoptive family as she is with the three central mothers. Ruth and her former colleague JP attempt to form a communal household where women share the childcare: “We need some funding, right? Like some funding we could apply for, like arts council funding but the project is raising some children and not doing it wrong and not going completely insane and killing everyone.”

Johnson’s command of language is simply stunning. Several moments, such as her description of being on a swing, left me agog at how accurately they conjure the intricacies of long-ago childhood experience. “In the space between the top and the bottom of the swing there is elastic time, slowed to a drip,” she writes. “Her feet brush the trees opposite, her head when she tips it over the apex of her spine scrapes a line from purple sky down into the ground. She is in the ground. She is up in the air, lifting from the seat.”

Meanwhile, the way she conveys noise sensitivity from the perspective of a neurodivergent boy feels truly fresh and inventive, the flow of her sentences mimicking the rush of sensory overload: “The blasting burp of traffic surging and jamming and beeping lights and beeping reversing and the clack and click and stamp of shoes and doors slamming dogs yap yap yapping at cars cats yowling at dawn jangle of chains on the playground swings moving whump of heavy bags thrown onto the floor the derisive call of the birds and everywhere everywhere everywhere the yammer and hassle and blunt object of human chatter.”

How the plot of Long Wave resolves is almost beside the point – and what a joy it is to read a writer who so confidently prioritises character and language above gimmick or twist. Though it is never mentioned, Gaza, and the tragic separation, through death or disappearance, of mothers and babies feels to me like a spectre here. This is a novel with a deep sadness to it, perhaps because it will have been written at a time when the news was full of people searching through the rubble for their families; some of that desperation and loss has been distilled into its prose. The cause of the mysterious “drowning” Ruth saw – is it a premonition? The manifestation of some collective maternal unconscious? A glitch in time, the linearity of which is an illusion? – is never wholly explained, though we have an inkling. Johnson goes far deeper than before in her examination of love and fear and separation, and as a result creates a work that will endure with readers long after they have closed its pages.

• Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.