Salvage

by Jennifer Mills

Two estranged sisters reconnect in the aftermath of ecological and social collapse, in this work of suspenseful, deeply human literary speculative fiction.

They drift in their sleep, waiting for something. The end of the world, or another escape. But the world is still here. There's no escaping it.

Jude's life has been about survival. She works on rebuilding - fixes roofs, trucks supplies, transports refugees. Tries to stay free from attachments and obligations.

But Jude won't talk about her past. Or her sister Celeste, lost in the tragic failure of a space station that was supposed to save her, and the other ultra-rich, from the wreckage of a dying world.

When an escape pod falls from the sky, its passenger near death, Jude knows her anonymous existence can't continue. As the fragile peace of her community is put at risk, Jude must re-examine the terms of her survival - and her exile.


Salvage is a gripping novel of literary speculative fiction that what does it mean to care for each other, after the end of the world?

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Climate Change Fiction

448 pages, Paperback

Published May 27, 2025

About the author

Jennifer Mills is the author of five books: the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018; shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award for Literature and the 2019 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel), Gone (2011), and The Diamond Anchor (2009), and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (2012). In 2012 Mills was named a Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald and in 2014 was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Mills lives on Kaurna Yerta.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot to love here. Mills serves us a cast of deeply compelling characters, and a meticulously built world that is far enough in the future to feel interesting, but close enough to feel connected to. She writes with verve, and expressive imagery, meaning it is the clusters of communities that have stayed with me, weeks after I finished reading. Mills deploys subtelty and emotional smarts in exploring the ways that class intersects with survival in particular, and gives us a variety of responses to trauma and upheaval. Many of the briefly glimpsed characters feel deeply real. Mills also gives us functional communities, things to hope for, in the midst of a dystopia that feels ever closer.
The problem however, is that the plot is silly. And while Mills effectively builds tension by threading three timelines, creating a page turning compulsion to see how they all marry up, this starts to curdle as the silly becomes more apparent. There are spectacular, unexplained co-incidences, but also many characters making big choices in ways not the finest character work can make really plausible, and a heroine who has the most adventurous life. But it is the main McGuffin around a space station that just loses both point and plausibility. By the end, sadly, I wished mainly for our plucky hero to find herself in a better plotline. Or just to hang out in this finely crafted world.

[olive · Rating 3 out of 5]

apart from the earth, the only other thing that needed salvaging were the 2-sentence backstories of the random side characters

[Carol Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever and compelling story of a possible future for our embattled planet. Is one of the characters rather like a certain Elon Musk? I thought Jude was great and I really wanted to know what would happen to her. The several timelines went back and forth quite a lot, but there were good indicators to let you know where you were.

[Ben Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, understated work of science-fiction. It's a slow burn and can feel draggy at times, especially with the three concurrent timelines, but worth it. Lots to ponder.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a good novel. Favourite book this year so far… Sci-fi, climate change and human characters. I loved the depths of the characters and the wonderful flawed strong female lead. Awesome writing, thank you to the author.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really great setting and promising premise as well as a very very interesting plot potential but near the end but way way way too draggy!!! There was so much character exposition but by the time we reached the end of the book I still wasn’t invested in what happened to them at all; should have explored more of the scientific elements

[Robert Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing book from one of our most interesting speculative fiction authors.
Climate fiction as it should be - cautionary but clear-eyed and intensely humanist.
Full review to come.

[BOof]

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?

FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a 3.5, rounded down to 3.
There is a great book in here somewhere, but a good editor was needed to dig it out. It’s 448 pages long, and really shouldn’t have been more than 300. If it were shorter, I think it could have been far more impactful and engaging. As it was, I felt like I had to keep dragging myself back to it, because I really did want to see how it ended.

On the plus side, I think the world building was really well done, I felt like I got a good sense of the medium-distant future that was being inhabited. It felt in many ways like a different world, but also fully believable and grounded. The characters were for the most part well established and also believable. I also enjoyed all three of the “timelines”/ perspectives that we switched between (except for one chapter which jumped forward in a way I found confusing, distracting and kind of pointless).

It was just the repetition and padding that dragged the whole story down. The number of times the main character *nearly* told someone a crucial piece of information and then backed off was kind of excruciating. And then she was furious when a decision was made that she didn’t like because the other characters didn’t have the information that she had withheld. Seriously rolled my eyes at that. Infuriating.
There was also just a lot of unnecessary detail. Every step taken to complete a task being spelled out.

As I said, it just needed some serious trimming from a skilled editor and it really could have been great.
I’ll keep an eye out for more books by Jennifer Mills.

[Sam Proietto · Rating 3 out of 5]

(5.5/10) This was an attempt to read firmly outside my usual genre, with something far more literary. There was a while where it was working for me - around page 200, the slow burn had evolved into a really genuine interest for me as to what would happen once the big buildup in the book would pay off. Unfortunately, I lost the thread after that, because the direction the plot went was nothing conceptually revelatory, and the execution was extremely slow and repetitive. Jude is for sure a well-developed character, but I did not want to read the same scene of her almost divulging things about her life that many times. Also, I did not love the inclusion of the 'November' thread in the book; to me it only detracted from the 'August' plot to have seen what was coming to that degree, rather than adding excitement.

[Lisa]

Abandoned at page 50.
I thought, when I read Gone in 2011, that Mills was going to be one of the few Australian authors writing about the underclass. I kept reading when she turned to dystopia (Dyschronia, and The Airways), but this one has lost me.
I don't rate books I don't finish.

[Madeleine Laing · Rating 4 out of 5]

So hard to rate - a fantastic, well-realised and constructed book with an ending that felt like the author basically... gave up? It was ridiculously rushed and incongruous. Though this was only a small part of a mostly great and thoughtful book, and I really recommend it to anyone who wants to envision a more hopeful, though realistic and painful, future.

[Lydia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was surprised by how tedious and repetitive this book was. Main character was boring and one dimensional (liking coffee and being taciturn is not a personality). Main characters sister spends most of the book repeating the same scene of lurching through a space station then falling asleep. Too many background characters the writer didn’t flesh out enough to care about. Overall disappointing.

[Andrew Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the multiple timelines and POVs fascinating and I really enjoyed this as a work of speculative fiction. It did however stretch my credulity at times, especially towards the end. Having said that I still give this 4 stars.

[JESH · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a review of this book as a post-apocalyptic novel with a hopeful ending. I read it as an antidote to Tim Winton’s Juice, but it didn’t hold out much hope for the world. Fiction, I know, but all pretty bleak.

[Ben Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit like Children of Men, in that the most interesting stuff is in the background world and incidental details. This makes it worth the prestige TV plot morselling, and an almost parodic "QUIET TYPE" main character.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent Dystopia

[Chanel Chapters]

DNF

[Mark Gett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good premise. Started well but the ending was lame. It seemed to lose the plot about half way through.

[lisey · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best books i’ve read this year. i really liked it. i will be thinking about it for a long time.

i want to read more books like this.