The Art of Salvage
a novel about messing up and finding hope
“ Full of naked longing and quick, piercing insight ”
– Lisa Moore
“ Finely written and acutely observed ”
– Yann Martel
An intimate and compelling novel about a mother and daughter
Resilience can take different forms, not all of them easily recognized at first glance. The Art of Salvage is about loss and what can and can’t be salvaged from loss. Delorie, a teenage mom in the 1970s, relinquishes her newborn daughter to be raised “back home” by her own parents. Tragic events and at least one lie that goes on far too long are tempered with a sense of optimism, and with many flashes of humour. People make their own way as best they can, and those in their lives must simply come to terms.
Booklist praised The Art of Salvage as “a wonderful achievement.”
The Globe and Mail called the novel “a book of loss and hope told with eloquence and fearlessness.” The StarPhoenix said it’s “a carefully crafted novel which should not be missed by anyone who wants a book that will make them think.” The reviewer at Back of the Book said, “If this novel were a painting, it would be a prairie landscape with small human figures tenaciously present in the stark division between earth and sky – the flat horizon an emotional tightrope.”
“A finely written and acutely observed novel about how, from the wreckage of broken lives, pieces can be gathered and glued back together into something not just make-do but permanent and noble. Indeed, the art of salvage is the art of living, is the art of hope, and what holds it all together is that messiest of glues: love. Theis’s novel is suffused with that emotion.””
“Leona Theis writes with the bravest honesty imaginable about what it takes to be a mother or a daughter, how we fail and pull through. The Art of Salvage is full of naked longing and quick, piercing insight; it’s smart and fast and vivid. All the painful contractions and blood-pounding emotions at the heart of a family.””