From The Wreck

Review by Ilse Scheepers

From a kernel of personal history - the survival of her ancestor George Hills in a catastrophic shipwreck - Jane Rawson has spun an eerie, disquieting tale about the nature of survival and the connection between the human world and the animal one.

Rawson takes things in a startling direction early on, bringing to mind the New Weird fiction of authors like China Mieville: as well as a wholly human protagonist, one of her key characters is an alien from another dimension who takes the form of an octopus. I always knew they were up to something, the slimy things.

But unlike Mieville and his cohort, Rawson keeps a tight grip on the narrative, never letting it spill into the absurd. Her ability to keep its feet firmly rooted in historical fiction, with just a tinge of the strange is what makes this a fantastic read.