This original, electrifying debut explores the collision point of memory, family, and forgiveness.

After witnessing a horrific accident, an unnamed thirty-something woman flees her hectic Manhattan life and buys a rambling house in rural Virginia to recover. Spending her days wandering through her untamed garden and her nights drinking in solitude before the fire, she begins to face some tough questions related to her isolated childhood in 1970s suburbia as well as her involvement in a stranger’s death at a subway station.

As this woman watches her mother, Lois — an eccentric, flamboyant woman who is dating a series of men named after saints — grow increasingly unhinged, the irony of her own madness is not lost. For she has, in fact, engaged in an increasingly disconcerting, decade-long conversation with the ghost of her dead sister, Nancy.

Darkly funny, deeply imaginative, and fueled by unexpected, poetic prose, Salvage brilliantly captures the challenge of creating 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.