Empty Spaces

“A singular, incantatory work, one that reimagines James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. . . . Told from the perspective of a contemporary city-dwelling Nisga’a person, the book feels as though forest itself is speaking, sky itself, river itself.”—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“Empty Spaces is nearly without precedent—its scale is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans; its conceptual sophistication reminds me of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!; its critique of settler colonialism is as intellectually rigorous as Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive. It is hard to think of a more original work.”—Sarah Dowling, University of Toronto

“In Empty Spaces, Jordan Abel cultivates a relationship to land that is textual, a necessary act of both lamentation and futurity. By under- and over- and re-writing a canonized settler novel, Abel displaces the descriptive violence of the colonial imagination, its anthropological heft, and replaces it with, subsumes it under, a lyric voice and language that reminds us ‘[t]omorrow might arrive in the next few seconds.’”—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus

“I did not want to leave Empty Spaces. I saw and heard things I haven’t before: the breath of rocks, bodies open like lakes, broken air, shore and shrub and softness, the outline and humidity of life in every bend. This is a spiritually tectonic book—it will restore life inside you.”—Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree