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.

Jordan Abel is a Nisga'a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel's latest project NISHGA (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2020) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Jordan Abel's profile page

• Winner, Governor General's Literary Awards - Fiction
• Short-listed, Amazon Canada First Novel Award

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