Salvage - Jane F Kotapish

The narrator of Salvage - a woman in her early thirties - has left her hectic Manhattan lifestyle for rural Virginia. Escaping a trauma suffered on the New York subway, she is also fighting demons from her childhood - in the form of Nancy, an imagined product of her mother Lois's miscarried pregnancy. Lois is the other problematic relationship in her life. Bizarrely unhinged and increasingly eccentric, it seems that she's developing close friendships with various Saints from the Dark Ages. The narrator fears for her sanity, but when the Saints actually start to turn up for dinner and drinks, the fragile reality of her own world seems to be under threat.

Jane F. Kotapish is a native of Virginia and studied at the College of William and Mary and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She was a professional dancer in New York for ten years, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. Salvage is her debut novel.