“Bursting with intimate contact with plants and sea creatures, who seem to grow from the writer’s pen as the origins of life might do, Salvage is a story about love, faith and the future. In this gem of a book, rooted in ideas Richard Kearney has been developing for decades, the writing is healing. It heralds the recovery of a rich Irish wisdom, something the world needs now more than ever.”
Salvage
by Richard Kearney
It’s 1939 and young Maeve O’Sullivan and her family are among the last inhabitants of a windswept island off the south coast of Ireland. After her father drowns in a boating accident, Maeve finds herself the last inheritor of the old ways of healing. But the future beckons to Maeve with the arrival of Seamus, a handsome young medical student heading for Dublin. Maeve suddenly finds herself at a crossroads, torn between the pull of the past and the lure of the modern. Must she sacrifice one in order to accommodate the other? St Brigid, patroness of poetry, craft and midwifery, hovers over this richly evocative story about the tension between progress and tradition. Timely and timeless, Kearney’s novel offers sensual homage to a singular landscape brimming with a Gaelic wisdom about the natural world.
“This is a gentle and erotic story thrown into a rough world…The writing itself is the healing of both writer and reader… there is much to be learned from this island tale that tells us how fruitful ‘the little way’ can be. This is another great book of intelligent religious feeling to come out of Ireland’”
-Fanny Howe, The Harvard Review
“Salvage, Richard Kearney’s third novel, centers on powerful forces of nature… the book is a joy.”
-Catherine Fitzpatrick, Irish Literary Supplement
Richard Kearney
Richard Kearney is an Irish philosopher and writer who holds the Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He has written many books on European philosophy, narrative imagination, and Irish culture, as well as a book of poetry and two previous novels, Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level. Kearney is also director of the international Guestbook Project of Narrative Hospitality.
