CBC's Best Canadian Non-Fiction 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 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.

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (Thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.

Dionne Brand's profile page

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

"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)

"Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto's former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer 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)