Author Description

Calling to mind The Lovely Bones, this original, electrifying debut explores the collision point of memory, family secrets, and forgiveness. After witnessing a horrific accident, our unnamed thirty-seven-year-old narrator flees her hectic Manhattan life and buys a rambling, Victorian house in rural Virginia to recover in solitude. Yet in the uncomfortable quiet of her own company, she finds herself facing questions and obsessions from life's tangled, and often distrubed past. Meanwhile, she watches her mother, Lois - an eccentric, flamboyant woman who begins dating a series of men all named after saints - grow increasingly unhinged, perhaps poised on the cusp of madness. And as a charming new neighbor slowly moves into her carefully guarded privacy, the narrator discovers the impossibility of hiding from her isolated childhood in 1970s suburbia and talking to the ghost of her dead sister Nancy. Darkly funny, deeply imaginative, and fueled by unexpected, poetic prose, Salvage captures the challenge of finding a home that can withstand all that haunts us and the subtle and disastrous ways in which mothers and daughters lose and find one another, time and again.