Praise:
March 2008 Book Sense Notable Selection
“Salvage is a fascinating mosaic of acute observations - delicate, troubling and humane.”– A.L. Kennedy, author of Day and Paradise
“There are sentences in Salvage that are astoundingly beautiful and exacting, and perhaps most remarkable is the fact that these sentences occur on almost every page. Echoes of Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bishop can be found in the work’s intellectual power, sensitivity and linguistic precision, but Jane Kotapish surely wields the voice of an original, uniquely talented writer.” – Sarah Hall, author of Haweswater and The Electric Michelangelo (a finalist for the Man Booker Prize)
“Salvage is a very good novel – sharp, intense, and in a curious way, passionate. It certainly adds with great effect to the mother/daughter literature already existing. The imagery stopped me racing on time and time again – I found myself re-reading sentences…Remarkable.” – Margaret Forster, author of Diary of an Ordinary Woman and Keeping the World Away
“…breathtakingly original…Spikily funny and darkly imaginative, Salvage is an unsettling look into a troubled psyche.” – Caroline Leavitt, Dame Magazine
“Kotapish artfully juxtaposes with complexity and honesty the ironies of self-reliance and loneliness, of freedom and happiness, and of being independent and female.” – The Brooklyn Rail
“…[an] unnerving debut.” – Publishers Weekly
“Out of Jane Kotapish’s deeply poetic prose emerges a range of complex emotions and relationships that linger in the reader’s thoughts...The power of the novel lies in Kotapish’s unique exploration of how we come to terms with difficult childhood events and the profound impact they have on our lives.” – The Feminist Review
“Jane Kotapish's debut is devilishly sardonic and beautifully insightful. In this novel about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship—an unforgettable story about daughters who want more and mothers who just can't give anything—Kotapish illuminates every page with her astounding prose and clever attention to detail.” – Chelsey Clammer, Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)
Salvage
By Jane F. Kotapish
March 14, 2008ISBN: 978-1-59692-283-9
Format: Hardcover Genre: Fiction Pages: 300
Price: Rights: U.S., Audio Other Rights: Curtis Brown U.K.
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Buy this book at: BookSense.com
About the Book
Bringing to mind the lyricism and intrigue of History of Love, 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, time and again.
About the Author
Jane F. Kotapish is a modern dancer and freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. A native of Virginia, she studied at the College of William and Mary and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Salvage is her first novel.