Salvage

Jennifer Mills is an ambitious and often experimental author; her latest novel, Salvage, is her furthest venture into speculative fiction yet, taking readers to a not-so-far-flung future, to a world after political and environmental collapse. But the factors that lead to this collapse remain oblique – Mills’ story is not about the downfall of a civilisation, but about the work of carrying on, and how community bonds can salvage even a seemingly lost world.

The story follows Jude, a laconic woman in the Freelands – a slightly ramshackle socialist society that survives with the motto: If you can help, help. Decades after they last saw each other, Jude is still haunted by the memory of her older sister, Celeste, who became obsessed with fleeing the dangers of Earth by venturing into space. Jude believes Celeste died on the ill-fated space station that was meant to be her sanctuary, but when an escape pod crash-lands in the Freelands, Jude is unexpectedly once again face to face with her sister – and must work out how to look after Celeste, herself, and her community.

There are four timelines woven together in this intricate novel: Jude and Celeste’s fraught adolescence; the immediate aftermath of the escape pod’s crash landing; Celeste’s memories of what happened on the space station; and a point a few months after the escape pod landed, when Celeste’s survival has brought unwelcome attention from the authoritarian government of the neighbouring Alliance – the antithesis of the egalitarian Freelanders. Across these narrative strands, we see Jude grappling with how to help her sister without losing herself in the process.

Throughout Salvage, Mills explores the importance of helping others and of accepting help ourselves, and the bonds of community that form when help is given or received. Salvage is ultimately a hopeful novel, suggesting that working together and doing our best for each other is the best hope we have of rebuilding a better world – either post- or pre‑apocalypse.