In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found?
 
The characters in This Is Salvaged search fervently for meaning through one another:
A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor who is descending into dementia...
A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators...
One sister consumes the ashes of another...
And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications...
 
In stories that are wise and funny, beautiful and strange, Vauhini Vara-author of the award-winning The Immortal King Rao, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize-writes with compassion, but without sentimentality, about loss and longing and attempting to find hope in the midst of grief.