The book is based on the 1859 shipwreck of the Australian steamship, the SS Admella and is a fictionalised account of Rawson's great-great-grandfather George Hills, a survivor from the wreck, and his encounter with a shapeshifting alien.

Alone and lost, it boards the Admella and assumes the shape of the first creature it sees, a passenger named Bridget Ledwith.

He marries his fiancée Eliza and has three children, but George is sure that the midwife at the birth of his firstborn, Henry, is the woman from the wreck.

The alien is hiding in plain sight in George's household disguised as a cat, and when Henry is born, attaches itself to his back.

But when George sees the woman from the wreck, he immediately attacks her, and the alien quickly morphs back into a cat and flees.

From the Wreck is based on the 1859 shipwreck of the Australian steamship, the SS Admella, that ran aground on Carpenters Reef in South Australia.

For eight days survivors clung to the remains of the ship and slowly died from exposure and lack of food and water.

This has affected a lot of people,'"[7] The novel started out as a work of historical fiction, but after a few failed drafts Rawson shelved it.

Rawson said the novel takes place in Australia in the mid-19th century, when white settlers did not know what they would find in the unexplored bush and oceans.

She said it was "technically difficult", but added that her alien "is a metaphor ... she stands in for all the other species that humans just don't give a rat's arse about.

"[8] Reviewing the book in Books+Publishing, Alan Vaarwerk said From the Wreck has elements of history, science fiction and magic realism, making it "utterly unique and distinctly Australian".

[9] Ed Wright wrote in The Australian that Rawson "stretch[es] our capacity to believe", making apparently incompatible ideas click together.

"[10] In a review in The Canberra Times, Adam Rivett described From the Wreck as "an old-fashioned historical yarn spliced with Cronenbergian body horror".

Sun noted that by imagining what could have happened to Rawson's great-great-grandfather, she turned an apparently ordinary man's life into something extraordinary.

[12] Writing in the Australian Book Review, Fiona Wright called From the Wreck "a deeply ecological novel", not quite cli-fi, but one that emphasises "the connectedness of creatures: animal, human, and other worldly".