From The Wreck | Jane Rawson

The first novel to be nominated for both Australia's leading SF Prize (the Aurealis, which it won) and for its leading literary award (the Miles Franklin), From the Wreck 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 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 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.