The first novel to be nominated for both Australias leading SF Prize (the Aurealis, which it won) and for its leading literary award (the Miles Franklin), &i>From the Wreck&/i> is a novel of strange and wonderful imagination, imbued with beauty and feeling, existential loneliness and a deep awareness of the interdependence of all life.
When George Hills is pulled from the wreck of the steamship Admella, he carries with him memories of a disaster that claims the lives of almost every other soul on board. Almost every other soul.
Because as he clung on to the wreck, George wasn't alone: someone else - or something else - kept George warm and bound him to life. Why didn't he die, as so many others did, half-submerged in the freezing Southern Ocean? And what happened to his fellow survivor, the woman who seemed to vanish into thin air?
George will live out the rest of his life obsessed with finding the answers to these questions. He will marry, father children, but never quite let go of the feeling that he was not done when he emerged from the ocean that day, that same presence has been watching him ever since. The question of what this creature might want from him - his life? His first-born? Simply to return to its home? - will pursue him, and call him back to the ocean, where it all began.
Blending genres, perspectives and worlds, Jane Rawson's From the Wreck is a chilling and tender story about how fiercely we cling to life, and how no one can survive on their own.
Haunting and marvellous . . .
From the Wreck takes real historical events and bends them to its own ends in a manner I've not seen before, an imaginative leap that truly exemplifies the nature of radical speculation.
