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. Something approaching an old-fashioned historical yarn spliced with Cronenbergian body horror . . . The commonplace rubbing shoulders with the supernatural adds to the book's considerations of mourning and absence a vivid hue . . . a genuine tension and sense of dread.