From the Wreck

Winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and nominated for the Miles Franklin Award.

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 was pulled from the wreck of the steamship Admella, he carried with him memories of a disaster that claimed the lives of almost every other soul on board. Almost every other soul.

Because as he clung onto 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 something else came out of the ocean that day, something that has been watching him ever since. The question of what this creature might want from him - his life? his first-born? to simply return home? - will pursue him, and call him back to the ocean once again.

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.

"The power of this singular novel lies in Rawson's ability to meld seemingly disparate narrative elements into a convincing whole that movingly explores themes of loss, loneliness and guilt." —The Guardian 

"This strange story of love and loneliness, which explores how we all long to belong, is simply wonderful."—Daily Mail 

"Striking...What Rawson has ingeniously forged with From the Wreck is something approaching an old-fashioned historical yarn spliced with Cronenbergian body horror."—The Sydney Morning Herald 

"Absorbing...Full of deep currents and lurking fears."—Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Children of Time

Author bio:

Jane Rawson is the author of the novel A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, as well as the novella Formaldehyde, and a non-fiction book titled The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change. From the Wreck was the first novel to be nominated for both Australia's Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, which it won. Jane lives in Tasmania and works as a bureaucrat.