From the Wreck

"I find it a very exciting book. The author’s ancestor, George Hills, survived this shipwreck as a young man. She has taken that story and fictionalised it. So: he survives the shipwreck, but has this very strange embrace in the ocean with a mystery woman before he is saved. She’s gone. He doesn’t know what happened to her. He attempts to live a normal life. Gets married to someone really lovely, they have children, and their life moves through an unremarkable trajectory, though marked by extreme grief. But there’s someone with him, and it’s not just that he’s suffering from PTSD. He’s uneasy. He has the sense that he’s been followed, and he has—by a space entity. It almost sounds like a creative writing prompt or something, but it’s done so skilfully. This space entity takes the form of an octopus, a cat, a birthmark on his son’s neck, a woman. This entity provides an observation of this unremarkable life in a way that is unrelated to human or Christian morality. She remarks on all things as equally interesting. There’s a lovely passage, where she’s perched at a bar in the form of a woman, and she’s telling the woman next to her, like: have you tried a sandwich? Then: there’s leather, which is made of the skin of other creatures. Then: have you heard about singing? Sometimes everybody knows the words and they all say them together. It’s just a lovely, deeply non-judgemental observation which casts normal life into a kind of strangeness. I came to think that maybe it is the alien that is the authorial voice. It’s a literary book. I mean, it did win the Aurealis Prize, which is the science fiction/fantasy award here. But it was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Prize, if you know about that. Right. So it kind of straddles both. I absolutely recommend it."