“A triumphant, one-of-a-kind experiment . . . Much of Empty Set concerns the trauma of exile and its long-lasting effect on interrupted lives.” —Chicago Review of Books
How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
“The pure pleasure of this book is being inside our heroine Vero’s head: the way she Venns relationships like an auto-dendrochronologist, someone who has serious questions about plywood, but also about exile, Argentina, and the kind of loneliness that accompanies being part of an empty set.” —The Rumpus
“A smart story of love and loss with a clever mix of narrative techniques, Empty Set may be an antidote to the current climate of despair.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“An experimental mix of prose, diagrams and literary artifacts that is also, somehow, breathlessly plotted.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“In Empty Set, Verónica Gerber Bicecci has found a seemingly new and fascinating way to tell and show us a vital story of modern loneliness, exile, and imagination.” —Words Without Borders
“Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on loss, both personal and national.” —Kirkus Reviews