The Drift

A Five-Book Middle-Grade Adventure Series — Ages 8–12

Eleven-year-old Finn Cole has always felt the pull of the ocean. When his father disappears during a coast guard rescue mission off the Northumberland coast, Finn finds himself in the water — alone, freezing, and not as alone as he thinks.

Ren is a juvenile orca, newly guardian of an ancient secret buried in the deep water below. She has been drifting alone since losing her mother. When she surfaces beside a grieving boy in a storm, something passes between them that neither can explain.

It is called the Drift — an ancient frequency running through the world's oceans, older than anything on the surface, carrying memory and emotion and the accumulated knowledge of twenty thousand years.

Together, Finn and Ren will travel the world's oceans — from the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific reef, from the Pacific deep to the Arctic ridge to the Great Barrier Reef — uncovering a secret that spans time itself, while fighting to protect the ocean environments that make life on Earth possible.

Each book in the series is woven through with a real ocean conservation crisis — orca captivity and pod disruption, shark finning and reef decline, plastic pollution and the Pacific Garbage Patch, Arctic ice melt, and Great Barrier Reef bleaching. These are not background details. They are the story, experienced through characters who have lost something to them and carry that loss personally.

The Drift is a series about what we owe the ocean. And what the ocean has always known about us. Written for the next generation of ocean stewards — and anyone who has ever stood at the water's edge and felt something looking back.