It is the second book of a two-book deal Allan signed with Titan in 2015; the first is the second edition of her debut novel, The Race, published in 2016.

[6] The development of The Rift started from a short story Allan had been asked to write for Dead Letters: An Anthology of the Undelivered, the Missing, the Returned..., edited by Conrad Williams.

[7] Hatchmere lake features prominently in The Rift, but Allan only had a chance to visit the site after she had begun work on the novel.

Twenty years later, Selena, who now works for Vanja at a jewellery store, and has come to terms with her sister's disappearance, is surprised by a phone call from a woman claiming to be Julie and requesting a meeting.

Julie explains that she was abducted by Jimson and taken to Hatchmere lake; she remembers escaping from him, then finding herself in a strange place and taken in by a woman named Cally and her brother, Noah.

In a review in Locus magazine, Gary K. Wolfe wrote that The Rift is about "memory and identity" and tests our perceptions of reality.

[11] He called Allan's writing "subversive" in that she "play[s] with ... the familiar protocols of genre and ... the nature of the reading experience itself".

[11] Wolfe said Allan states her influences clearly in the novel by titling the section on Julie's story, "A Voyage to Arcturus", alluding to David Lindsay's 1920 novel of the same name; she also includes an essay by Julie, written before she disappears, on Peter Weir's 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Wolfe concluded that Allan's trail of clues "seems judicious and, at its best, brilliant", and "test whether our allegiance is to the SF adventure ... or to the ... earthbound mystery behind Julie's disappearance".

Writing in Interzone Speller explained that "we're dealing with the stories people tell themselves in order to make sense of things they don't understand".

[10] In a review in Strange Horizons, author Marcel Inhoff described The Rift as a "slipstream" novel, one that "move[s] in between genres" and eludes classification.

Clute added that Julie's story "is as insinuatingly plausible" as Kirk Allen's in Robert Lindner's 1955 book, The Fifty-Minute Hour.