In Salvage, internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Austen's Mansfield Park; the ways that the practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live.

The scene is the act of reading; the book, another kind of forensics—a forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and from which she must recover. Or, if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography, and much more than a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers. (From Knopf Canada)

Dionne Brand is one of Canada's most decorated and celebrated writers. As a queer black novelist, poet and filmmaker, she has been creating in various mediums for over 40 years. She is a member of the Order of Canada and has won numerous awards, including the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry for the collection Land to Light On and the 2006 Toronto Book Award for the novel What We All Long For. Brand also won the 2019 Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize presented to an LGBTQ writer for their body of work.