Empty Spaces cover art

Empty Spaces

Preview

Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Empty Spaces

Written by: Jordan Abel
Narrated by: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $27.97

Buy Now for $27.97

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Winner of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction • Shortlisted for the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award

From the acclaimed, boundary-breaking author of
NISHGA comes a hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy.

Reimagining James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga’a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonial violence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, the successive chapters of Empty Spaces move toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America. The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing.

Jordan Abel’s extraordinary debut work of fiction grows out of his groundbreaking visual compositions in NISHGA, which integrated descriptions of the landscape from Cooper’s settler classic into his father's traditional Nisga'a artwork. In Empty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself, subjecting them to bold rewritings and inviting us to come to a crucial understanding: that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as our world lurches toward uncertainty.

©2023 Jordan Abel (P)2023 McClelland & Stewart
United States World Literature
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What the critics say

Winner of the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction • Shortlisted for the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award

"With a combination and manipulation of found materials, and eschewing a traditional human main character, the land in Empty Spaces becomes the centre. Abel’s compelling and hypnotic prose, with its reverse beginnings, repetition, rewriting and revision, feels like settling into a hot spring that grounds the reader in the present moment. Beautiful, poetic and revelatory." —Chris Eaton, Francesca Ekwuyasi, and Jen Ferguson, the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction peer assessment committee

What listeners say about Empty Spaces

Average Customer Ratings
Overall
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing

I honestly loved it. Such a captivating performance for such an unusual but compelling work.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!