Latest news with #Salvage
The Age
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
This new cli-fi novel envisages a more hopeful apocalypse
FICTION SalvageJennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In Salvage, Jennifer Mills lets the billionaires escape our dying planet on a space station with a VIP list. And then she leaves them there to rot. This is Mills' first, fully fledged science-fiction novel to portray the before and after of ecological apocalypse, but it continues her merging of the uncanny or speculative with her artistic instinct for spatial and psychological choreography. In other words, Mills' novels begin by asking: what kind of world is this? But the focus is always on what it feels like to inhabit these unusual worlds. The Airways, Mills' previous novel, was ostensibly a queer fabulist horror story about a ghost seeking revenge. But this hook was masquerading a second, more experimental desire to assign a new form of language to this state of being. Dyschronia, which was short-listed for the 2019 Miles Franklin prize, ventured into weird fiction, imagining the desolation after the shore receded from an Australian coastal town, converting it overnight into a location of dark tourism – much to the chagrin of the few inhabitants who refused to leave. Taken all together, Mills' fiction continually returns to hauntings; her works explore how spectres from the past are eternally resurrecting in the present. Salvage is told through three interchanging sections. The first introduces us to Jude, living through the post-apocalypse by helping a loose collective of sovereign territories known as the Freelands. They implement forms of anarchy – non-hierarchical governance, direct democracy, the abolition of ownership – which history tells us works incredibly well in smaller factions but has never produced a viable macro-vision for the future. The Freelands exist on the fringes of a technologically and militarily superior state called The Alliance, which is governed by the antithesis: strict order, class, the rule of law. Each of these societies, given an opportunity to reinvent themselves, find older ideologies guiding how they rebuild the world from the scraps of older civilisations. Which way was it to utopia again? As a young girl, Jude was adopted by a billionaire, who later died in a helicopter crash. Jude's sister, Celeste, inherited the family fortune and invested it in space station project Endeavour, in which self-appointed chosen ones were given a seat on board this arc-like saviour, orbiting the Earth in a chemically induced torpor to 'sleep through the worst'. The second sections of Salvage are narrated by Celeste, on board Endeavour, shuffling at intervals down corridors, knocking into other boutique cosmonauts, looking for her sister. They soon suspect they've been abandoned or tricked, and strange occurrences and malfunctions do nothing to ease the nerves. In the third section, Jude and Celeste are together, before the apocalypse. They exist in a fortified complex called Sovereign House, basically a military bunker sequestered from the suffering and ruin experienced by everyone else. In these passages, we see Celeste persuaded by the mad billionaire looking for investors into his space station project, while Jude becomes disenchanted with her sister's myopic privilege.
Sydney Morning Herald
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
This new cli-fi novel envisages a more hopeful apocalypse
FICTION SalvageJennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In Salvage, Jennifer Mills lets the billionaires escape our dying planet on a space station with a VIP list. And then she leaves them there to rot. This is Mills' first, fully fledged science-fiction novel to portray the before and after of ecological apocalypse, but it continues her merging of the uncanny or speculative with her artistic instinct for spatial and psychological choreography. In other words, Mills' novels begin by asking: what kind of world is this? But the focus is always on what it feels like to inhabit these unusual worlds. The Airways, Mills' previous novel, was ostensibly a queer fabulist horror story about a ghost seeking revenge. But this hook was masquerading a second, more experimental desire to assign a new form of language to this state of being. Dyschronia, which was short-listed for the 2019 Miles Franklin prize, ventured into weird fiction, imagining the desolation after the shore receded from an Australian coastal town, converting it overnight into a location of dark tourism – much to the chagrin of the few inhabitants who refused to leave. Taken all together, Mills' fiction continually returns to hauntings; her works explore how spectres from the past are eternally resurrecting in the present. Salvage is told through three interchanging sections. The first introduces us to Jude, living through the post-apocalypse by helping a loose collective of sovereign territories known as the Freelands. They implement forms of anarchy – non-hierarchical governance, direct democracy, the abolition of ownership – which history tells us works incredibly well in smaller factions but has never produced a viable macro-vision for the future. The Freelands exist on the fringes of a technologically and militarily superior state called The Alliance, which is governed by the antithesis: strict order, class, the rule of law. Each of these societies, given an opportunity to reinvent themselves, find older ideologies guiding how they rebuild the world from the scraps of older civilisations. Which way was it to utopia again? As a young girl, Jude was adopted by a billionaire, who later died in a helicopter crash. Jude's sister, Celeste, inherited the family fortune and invested it in space station project Endeavour, in which self-appointed chosen ones were given a seat on board this arc-like saviour, orbiting the Earth in a chemically induced torpor to 'sleep through the worst'. The second sections of Salvage are narrated by Celeste, on board Endeavour, shuffling at intervals down corridors, knocking into other boutique cosmonauts, looking for her sister. They soon suspect they've been abandoned or tricked, and strange occurrences and malfunctions do nothing to ease the nerves. In the third section, Jude and Celeste are together, before the apocalypse. They exist in a fortified complex called Sovereign House, basically a military bunker sequestered from the suffering and ruin experienced by everyone else. In these passages, we see Celeste persuaded by the mad billionaire looking for investors into his space station project, while Jude becomes disenchanted with her sister's myopic privilege.
The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Salvage by Jennifer Mills review – urgent post-apocalyptic novel proposes a better way of living
What does it mean to build a new world from the wreckage of a broken one? This question lies at the heart of Jennifer Mills' mesmerising fifth novel, Salvage – but it's one that her gruff, defensive protagonist Jude would rather avoid. For most of the novel, Jude has her head down and is hard at work, cooking, fixing engines, caring for other people. She's a survivor whose adaptative mechanisms involve leaving everything and everyone behind: 'Things will be simpler when she's on her own. Belonging nowhere, carrying nothing.' We meet Jude in the village of Northport in the Freelands, on the precipice of a dangerous journey, a narrative moment that both anticipates resolution, and disorients the reader. Mills doesn't rush to explain how Jude got to Northport or where she's going; the plot is revealed slowly through the novel's intricate design. Although Jude tries to convince her friends to stay away, to her immense vexation they won't let her play the role of the lonely hero – and Mills, anyway, has no truck with narrative models organised around a single exceptional protagonist. Jude is on a salvage mission, of sorts, but the reader's questions about what she is saving and why are not answered immediately. Mills devotes her energies instead to building the near-future world of the novel. The contours of the lands traversed by Jude are recognisable to readers in 2025. They are shaped by war and climate crisis, by inequality, by the chaos of extractive capitalism. Here the rich live in locked compounds and pods, the poor labour out of sight. Plants still grow but the seasons are 'haywire'. The Freelanders live in a post-national deregulated zone between 'nervous powers' in the postwar era. Together they are building a community according to the principles of distributed democracy, patching up roads that were bombed, reinhabiting abandoned villages; wresting, as Ursula Le Guin, one of Mills' most important influences, might put it, wild oats from their husks. Both writers are preoccupied with how people form viable communities and Mills' pays as much attention to the labour of care and repair as she does more traditional novelistic magnets like conflict and resolution. If you can help, help, the Freelanders remind each other. They welcome refugees, share resources and repurpose the flotsam that washes up on villages dotted along their shores. It's hard work, building this new world, and although she never hesitates to volunteer for manual labour, Jude tires of the affective slog of community; the tedium of committee meetings and consensus-based decision-making. To salvage is to be resourceful and by sharing what they salvage, the Freelanders are able to take care of each other and survive. In Jude's difficult course from fierce independence to apprehensive acceptance of the radical interdependence required to create a better world, Mills provides her reader with a timely model of resistance to despair and passivity. When a piece of space junk washes up on the shores of Northport, Jude must reckon with all that she has left behind. The rest of the community is almost as quick as Jude to identify it as a life-support pod from the Endeavour Station, a much-publicised spacecraft that served as a refuge for the megawealthy from conflict on Earth. All on board were presumed dead but, by some miracle, the pod contains a skeletal survivor, barely holding on to life. Jude knows at once that this is her adoptive sister, Celeste. The principal narrative arc of Salvage – Jude's quest, if we must – concerns this frail body: whether Jude will reveal her connection to Celeste; whether the sisters will have a chance to reconcile. In flashbacks we learn about Jude's many lives before her arrival in the Freelands: orphaned in infancy, adopted by a wealthy mining family, raised by Celeste and a dwindling domestic staff in a lonely compound. She runs away as a teenager, keeps running and taking on new names – only to realise that 'she has spent most of her life in flight, and outrun nothing'. A third narrative thread brings the reader into Celeste's dreamy, desperate consciousness as she wakes and falls back into torpor in space. The reader recognises before Jude does that the sisters are conjoined by their conviction that to survive this violent, unpredictable world requires isolation and hard protective shells. Even so, it is a vision of her lost sister that keeps Celeste alive as she floats away from the world. The three narratives converge at the climax of the novel, which is surprising and generous in its optimism. The resolution of the plot realises Mills' larger thematic ambitions and demonstrates her technical accomplishment. It's a beautifully structured novel, complex but never messy, and speaks in urgent tones to our contemporary moment. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Around Jude and her kin, Mills has crafted a novel that amounts to an argument for centring care and community in our strategies for survival. 'It was difficult,' Jude observes in an interaction with a Freelander early on, 'to unlearn habits of scarcity and competition and possession.' And yet as Salvage insists, with grace and conviction, we must. Salvage by Jennifer Mills is out through Pan Macmillan Australia ($34.99)
Sydney Morning Herald
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Estranged sisters and a curious gift: 14 new books to get stuck into this month
It may be the start of winter and things outside are cooling down, but there's no loss of heat in the book world, with a bumper crop of books being published this month. This selection includes an astonishing memoir, speculative fiction, love and other disasters in the `90s and so much more. Salvage Jennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In her fifth, speculative novel, the always imaginative Jennifer Mills plunges us into the lives of sisters Jude and Celeste. Jude is on an Earth plagued by climate disaster, war and antagonism, struggling to survive in the Freelands. Celeste, meanwhile, is trapped on some sort of spacecraft designed to help plutocrats escape the benighted world. But when something falls from the sky, we learn the full, human story of the estranged sisters. The War Within Me Tracy Ryan Transit Lounge, $34.99 In the second of her Queens of Navarre series, poet and novelist Tracy Ryan turns her focus from Marguerite of Navarre to her daughter, Jeanne d'Albret. It's a story of royal and religious conflict as Jeanne escapes an arranged marriage to find love with Antoine, with whom she reigned before the Counter-Reformation pitted them on opposing sides of the long-running French wars of religion. Ryan is working on a third instalment, To Share His Fortune. A Beautiful Family Jennifer Trevelyan Allen & Unwin, $32.99 There's an irony in the title of New Zealand writer Jennifer Trevelyan's much-anticipated coming-of-age debut as the narrator, 10-year-old Alix, discovers much more about her family and its secrets during a summer holiday in 1985. From Kahu, a boy she meets on the beach, she learns the story of Charlotte, a girl who drowned two years earlier and whose body has never been found. Together, they try to find out the truth of her death, which reveals truths not bargained for. A Different Kind of Power Jacinda Ardern Penguin, $55 Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand at the age of 37, and the way she dealt with the travails of high office along with the many major crises in NZ won her international admiration. Just think of her humane response to the appalling attack on the Christchurch mosques. Is there really a different way for politicians − and others − to lead? She argues forcefully that kindness and empathy are crucial. Let's hope other leaders take note of her methods. Our New Gods Thomas Vowles UQP, $34.99 Whether Thomas Vowles becomes a new god of literature remains to be seen, but judging by this debut novel set in the queer world of Melbourne he can certainly write gripping fiction. Ash is new to town and has quickly been befriended by James, who takes him to a party where his boyfriend, the charismatic and mysterious Raf, is DJing. But when Ash decides to leave, he stumbles across Raf outside and what he witnesses him doing is unsettling. Soon Ash is mixed up in something he really doesn't understand. The Death of Stalin Sheila Fitzpatrick Black Inc., $27.99 Black Inc. has made a point of publishing crisply written short books and essays that dissect global and local issues. In The Death of Stalin − not to be confused with Armando Iannucci's satirical film − Australia's pre-eminent Soviet historian tells us about the immediate change of direction after March 5, 1953, that was driven largely by the appalling director of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. In the simultaneously published Bombard the Headquarters, Linda Jaivin chronicles the disasters of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Aftertaste Daria Lavelle Bloomsbury, $32.99 Daria Lavelle's first novel is a bit bonkers really. Kostya's beloved dad is dead, but suddenly he tastes his father's favourite Ukrainian dish, pechonka. Over the years, aftertastes of food appear 'in his mouth like messages', until he discovers that by preparing specific foods or drinks he can bring the dead back from the purgatorial food hall where they are marooned. So, Kostya opens a restaurant to ease them to their next stage of death – but then things go a bit berserk. Foreign Country Marija Pericic Utimo Press, $34.99 Another pair of estranged sisters. When Eva gets a surprise letter from Elisabeta at her new apartment in Berlin she's puzzled to find it contains an airline ticket back to Australia. They've been apart for years, but Eva sets off to the Blue Mountains only to find that Elisabeta is dead and she is left to sort the debris of her life. Tucked into an absorbing narrative about the interaction of past and the present are documents and photos to provide a visual contrast with the emotional discoveries that Eva makes about her sister. The Prime Minister's Potato and Other Essays Anne-Marie Condé Upswell, $29.99 Historian and museum curator Anne-Marie Condé says she meditates on 'how the past can be understood through the interactions of people, places and things'. Her titular essay in this diverse and rather lovely collection tells of a curious 1942 gift from one William Frith to John Curtin as a 'cure for your akes and Pains'. Other essays dwell on the Australian War Memorial, Barry Humphries' character Sandy Stone, and the man who owned the house outside which the school bus would drop Condé each afternoon. The Name of the Sister Gail Jones Text, $34.99 Gail Jones is becoming positively prolific − this is her fourth novel in five years. She has turned away from the literary figures of her previous two books to what might be called literary crime. Who is this 'Jane', found wandering at night on a highway near Broken Hill? Freelance journalist Angie sees a feature in the predicament of the unknown woman, while her detective friend Bev is in charge of the case. Both want to discover the backstory, 'the maw of possibilities, deep down and red'. New Skin Miranda Nation Allen & Unwin, $32.99 Miranda Nation has runs on the board writing and directing the 2018 thriller Undertow and writing the TV series Playing Gracie Darling, due later this year. Which is clearly quite a big one for her as now comes publication of her first novel, one that features an intense first love between two medical students in the '90s, the drugs, the sex, the parties and then flashing years forward to the consequences and emotional hangovers. It's all a question of timing. Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li Fourth Estate, $32.99, June 4 Yiyun Li's memoir is an account of the death of her two sons, Vincent and James, by suicide six years apart. It is remarkable for its clear-sightedness and sensitivity. The Chinese-born novelist argues that children have to have the space to become fully themselves, and writes: 'I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.' Apple in China Patrick McGee Simon & Schuster, $36.99 June 4 Apple has got itself into something of a jam. As Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee puts it, the tech company's relationship with China 'has become politically untenable, yet the business ties are unbreakable'. Today, 90 per cent of all Apple's production takes place in China. With Apple's future 'inextricably linked to a ruthless authoritarian state', McGee also argues that today's China wouldn't be what it is without the company. Donald Trump may yet have more to say about all this. A Wisdom of Age Jacinta Parsons ABC Books, $34.99, June 6 Following on from A Question of Age, Jacinta Parsons delves into women's 'felt senses' to learn what it means to be human and how this understanding is changed by accumulated years. Through talking to many women around the country, she focuses on the disconnect between the way women who are ageing are treated in society and how they actually feel inside. Ageing, she writes, is not a malady that needs fixing, 'it needs for us to embrace it for what it offers us'.
The Age
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Estranged sisters and a curious gift: 14 new books to get stuck into this month
It may be the start of winter and things outside are cooling down, but there's no loss of heat in the book world, with a bumper crop of books being published this month. This selection includes an astonishing memoir, speculative fiction, love and other disasters in the `90s and so much more. Salvage Jennifer Mills Picador, $34.99 In her fifth, speculative novel, the always imaginative Jennifer Mills plunges us into the lives of sisters Jude and Celeste. Jude is on an Earth plagued by climate disaster, war and antagonism, struggling to survive in the Freelands. Celeste, meanwhile, is trapped on some sort of spacecraft designed to help plutocrats escape the benighted world. But when something falls from the sky, we learn the full, human story of the estranged sisters. The War Within Me Tracy Ryan Transit Lounge, $34.99 In the second of her Queens of Navarre series, poet and novelist Tracy Ryan turns her focus from Marguerite of Navarre to her daughter, Jeanne d'Albret. It's a story of royal and religious conflict as Jeanne escapes an arranged marriage to find love with Antoine, with whom she reigned before the Counter-Reformation pitted them on opposing sides of the long-running French wars of religion. Ryan is working on a third instalment, To Share His Fortune. A Beautiful Family Jennifer Trevelyan Allen & Unwin, $32.99 There's an irony in the title of New Zealand writer Jennifer Trevelyan's much-anticipated coming-of-age debut as the narrator, 10-year-old Alix, discovers much more about her family and its secrets during a summer holiday in 1985. From Kahu, a boy she meets on the beach, she learns the story of Charlotte, a girl who drowned two years earlier and whose body has never been found. Together, they try to find out the truth of her death, which reveals truths not bargained for. A Different Kind of Power Jacinda Ardern Penguin, $55 Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand at the age of 37, and the way she dealt with the travails of high office along with the many major crises in NZ won her international admiration. Just think of her humane response to the appalling attack on the Christchurch mosques. Is there really a different way for politicians − and others − to lead? She argues forcefully that kindness and empathy are crucial. Let's hope other leaders take note of her methods. Our New Gods Thomas Vowles UQP, $34.99 Whether Thomas Vowles becomes a new god of literature remains to be seen, but judging by this debut novel set in the queer world of Melbourne he can certainly write gripping fiction. Ash is new to town and has quickly been befriended by James, who takes him to a party where his boyfriend, the charismatic and mysterious Raf, is DJing. But when Ash decides to leave, he stumbles across Raf outside and what he witnesses him doing is unsettling. Soon Ash is mixed up in something he really doesn't understand. The Death of Stalin Sheila Fitzpatrick Black Inc., $27.99 Black Inc. has made a point of publishing crisply written short books and essays that dissect global and local issues. In The Death of Stalin − not to be confused with Armando Iannucci's satirical film − Australia's pre-eminent Soviet historian tells us about the immediate change of direction after March 5, 1953, that was driven largely by the appalling director of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. In the simultaneously published Bombard the Headquarters, Linda Jaivin chronicles the disasters of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Aftertaste Daria Lavelle Bloomsbury, $32.99 Daria Lavelle's first novel is a bit bonkers really. Kostya's beloved dad is dead, but suddenly he tastes his father's favourite Ukrainian dish, pechonka. Over the years, aftertastes of food appear 'in his mouth like messages', until he discovers that by preparing specific foods or drinks he can bring the dead back from the purgatorial food hall where they are marooned. So, Kostya opens a restaurant to ease them to their next stage of death – but then things go a bit berserk. Foreign Country Marija Pericic Utimo Press, $34.99 Another pair of estranged sisters. When Eva gets a surprise letter from Elisabeta at her new apartment in Berlin she's puzzled to find it contains an airline ticket back to Australia. They've been apart for years, but Eva sets off to the Blue Mountains only to find that Elisabeta is dead and she is left to sort the debris of her life. Tucked into an absorbing narrative about the interaction of past and the present are documents and photos to provide a visual contrast with the emotional discoveries that Eva makes about her sister. The Prime Minister's Potato and Other Essays Anne-Marie Condé Upswell, $29.99 Historian and museum curator Anne-Marie Condé says she meditates on 'how the past can be understood through the interactions of people, places and things'. Her titular essay in this diverse and rather lovely collection tells of a curious 1942 gift from one William Frith to John Curtin as a 'cure for your akes and Pains'. Other essays dwell on the Australian War Memorial, Barry Humphries' character Sandy Stone, and the man who owned the house outside which the school bus would drop Condé each afternoon. The Name of the Sister Gail Jones Text, $34.99 Gail Jones is becoming positively prolific − this is her fourth novel in five years. She has turned away from the literary figures of her previous two books to what might be called literary crime. Who is this 'Jane', found wandering at night on a highway near Broken Hill? Freelance journalist Angie sees a feature in the predicament of the unknown woman, while her detective friend Bev is in charge of the case. Both want to discover the backstory, 'the maw of possibilities, deep down and red'. New Skin Miranda Nation Allen & Unwin, $32.99 Miranda Nation has runs on the board writing and directing the 2018 thriller Undertow and writing the TV series Playing Gracie Darling, due later this year. Which is clearly quite a big one for her as now comes publication of her first novel, one that features an intense first love between two medical students in the '90s, the drugs, the sex, the parties and then flashing years forward to the consequences and emotional hangovers. It's all a question of timing. Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li Fourth Estate, $32.99, June 4 Yiyun Li's memoir is an account of the death of her two sons, Vincent and James, by suicide six years apart. It is remarkable for its clear-sightedness and sensitivity. The Chinese-born novelist argues that children have to have the space to become fully themselves, and writes: 'I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.' Apple in China Patrick McGee Simon & Schuster, $36.99 June 4 Apple has got itself into something of a jam. As Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee puts it, the tech company's relationship with China 'has become politically untenable, yet the business ties are unbreakable'. Today, 90 per cent of all Apple's production takes place in China. With Apple's future 'inextricably linked to a ruthless authoritarian state', McGee also argues that today's China wouldn't be what it is without the company. Donald Trump may yet have more to say about all this. A Wisdom of Age Jacinta Parsons ABC Books, $34.99, June 6 Following on from A Question of Age, Jacinta Parsons delves into women's 'felt senses' to learn what it means to be human and how this understanding is changed by accumulated years. Through talking to many women around the country, she focuses on the disconnect between the way women who are ageing are treated in society and how they actually feel inside. Ageing, she writes, is not a malady that needs fixing, 'it needs for us to embrace it for what it offers us'.
