Salvage

Readings from the Wreck

De: Dionne Brand

Narrado por: Dionne Brand

A New York Times Book Review's Notable Books • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • Winner of the a OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature • Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards • Trillium Book Prize-winning author 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 of what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary crticism and autobiography-as artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still-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 rigour 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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

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

“Brand shows that learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing. . . . Brand’s key point is that the minutiae of white characters’ daily lives serve to conceal the unseen—unsalvaged—minutiae of the enslaved and Indigenous lives under imperial control. . . . Equally suggestive are moments in Brand’s book when she shows us how a passage ostensibly not about the violence of colonialism is in fact a barely conscious acknowledgment of it.” —The New York Times Book Review

“This is Brand at her finest: meticulous research, incisive commentary, beautiful prose and a brilliant mind that makes exciting connections, all of which cause the reader to examine their own biases and assumptions. . . . Her approach remains fresh and unique.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“In this insightful meditation on her formation as a colonial subject, Brand attends to the instrumentality of the novel and the regime of the aesthetic in the project of empire. . . . A life can be ‘destroyed’ by books, Brand observes. . . . A life also can be remade by books.” —BOMB

“Scintillating. . . . Brand’s piercing analysis is at once sweeping and deeply personal, shedding light on how English literature whitewashed imperial conquests one reader at a time. It’s a potent reevaluation of the British literary canon.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A shrewd, intimate reading of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century novels that shaped her sense of self. . . . Penetrating cultural criticism.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)