Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics of chaotic coexistence.

Like the central characters’ lives, the narrative of Drift is perpetually ‘flickering in and out of space and time … in places remote and unfamiliar’. Set in contemporary Hobart – in Russon’s imagination a transient space inhabited by a host of interrelated alchemical characters, who are present both as children and adults, living and dead – Drift is populated by precocious children brought to life through a magic-realist style, and supernatural in their waking nightmares and apparitions.