EMPTY SPACES BY JORDAN ABEL

Penguin Random House, 2023.

Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces is labelled a “novel,” but what this book really does, in my eyes, is question what a novel really is. Instead of a narrative, for example, we have the land. There are bodies in this novel, flesh, but no typical arcs or characters; the rivers and asphalt and the smell of roses and copper permeate each page. This novel takes language from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and rewrites it, and it’s brilliant. Reading Empty Spaces feels like meditating. 

– Alex Deng, Toronto