National Network for Equitable Library Service

One of The New York Times' Notable Books of 2024 - One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 - One of CBC Books' Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2024. Dionne Brand explores English and American literature and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world—of what was possible and what was not. In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of non-fiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life—and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works—and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live. This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.