A Wreck of Seabirds

Karleah Olson is a young, first time author whose manuscript for A Wreck of Seabirds was shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award in 2023 and was subsequently published by Fremantle Press. This is a very WA novel, set in a coastal town and filled with the presence of the sea in all its moods -- beguiling, sunny, violent and threatening.

This novel is ambitiously structured into three threads. One is set in the present day, centred on the growing relationship between Ren, who has lost his younger brother, and Briony, whose sister has disappeared. One is set in the past, tracing the troubled history of Ren and Sam's family, and the last is ambiguous, following what has happened to Briony's missing sister. The different chapterlets are all very short, usually no more than a page or two, and until I twigged that each thread was labelled differently, I sometimes found myself a little lost.

A Wreck of Seabirds contains some beautiful writing and fits perfectly into the Coastal Gothic genre (Olson is studying this for her PhD). The mystery at the heart of Briony's sister's disappearance isn't fully answered, but perhaps, like the unresolved mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this is what gives the story its submerged power? I'll be interested to see what Olson does next.