South Australian author Jennifer Mills has long been concerned with what the future holds and the consequences of the ways humans exploit and abuse the planet. With Salvage, her fifth novel, Mills returns to the realism that marked her first novels The Diamond Anchor (2009) and Gone (2011), stepping away from her partiality for the uncanny and surreal that has marked her most awarded novels, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia (2018) and The Airways (2021). With terrifying clarity, Salvage creates a dystopia of the foreseeable future, perfectly believable in every broken ecological, political and social detail.

Salvage propels readers into a world struggling in the aftermath of war and climate crisis. The world building in this novel is a work of art. We feel the corrosion and smell the dust of an earth ravaged by fire, flood, rising seas and wealth inequality, under a sky busy with more satellites and space junk than stars. Yet much of Mills’ brilliance lies in the gaps and spaces, the questions left unanswered. There are no explanations. No catalyst for the war or history of the parties involved. There’s no detail about the mechanisms of environmental collapse. This is not a novel about the causes of climate crisis and societal breakdown but about surviving in the aftermath. It’s a story about relationships and the power of community to forge a new world from the wreckage of the old.

The plot revolves around two estranged sisters, Jude and Celeste, the daughters of an Australian billionaire, whose lives diverge after the sudden death of the rest of their family. Jude, the younger, adopted daughter is practical and down to earth. Always carrying a stone in her pocket, she’s a loner and keenly aware of her outsider status within the family. Celeste, the elder sister, is drowning in grief and so cut off from the world beyond the family compound she’s blind to her extreme privilege.

Jude escapes the unquestioned luxury of the compound and, shedding her ultra-rich identity like a snakeskin, goes into self-imposed exile, eventually finding a place to live a useful life within the Freelands – a society practicing a communal style of existence, salvaging and repurposing resources from the ruins of the past.

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Celeste, believing the world to be on the brink of total collapse, uses her fortune to purchase a berth on a space station funded by the super-elite. These billionaires intend to save themselves by waiting out the disaster, floating in induced stasis while the earth goes dark beneath them.

Both sisters share a desire for flight. Celeste escapes by leaving the earth, choosing to sleep until the worst had passed, floating in safety while the world burns below. Jude’s flight is more earthbound, jumping from city to city, ship to ship, whenever trouble threatens. Jude can’t sleep, anxiety about the world and her guilt about her background keeping her awake, while sleep is how Celeste chooses to cope.

Believing Celeste died with the other astronauts when the space station failed, Jude is still haunted with grief and guilt a decade later. But when an escape pod crashes back to Earth in the Freelands, caring for the survivor begins to strain the meagre resources and harmony of her community. Jude realises she can’t keep her identity secret any longer.

The story is told using three timelines. The narrative revolves between Jude’s past spanning her childhood and adolescence with Celeste to her post-exile journey across hemispheres, Celeste’s fragmented memories of her experience in the space station, and the months surrounding the crash of the escape pod and Jude’s expedition with her posse of Freelanders to reclaim Celeste from the Alliance, the authoritarian state beyond the border.

With chapters placed non-chronologically, wherever the narrative focus falls the story is rich in character and setting. This is a character-driven story, richly evoking Jude’s pain and reticence as her secretive nature butts against her guilt, deep sense of connection to her sister and responsibility to her community.

One of the many strengths of this novel is its placement of class among the triggers of societal and ecological breakdown. This is a world devastated by climate change, war and wealth inequality — with the latter given equal weight as a factor in the equation. As the world burns, the poor are disproportionately impacted, and the rich are casually oblivious.

Structurally exciting and intellectually stimulating, Mills melds literary and speculative fiction to create a work that is reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin in its focus on character and community over the political and environmental catalysts of collapse. Salvage presents readers with a much-needed provocation towards hope and opens our eyes to the potential of community and communal action to create a better world using the resources we have at hand — both material and human.

Salvage by Jennifer Mills (Picador Australia) is out now