Willow has heard stories about her mother's childhood in Prague before WWII, but Willow knows little of Jana’s life after the start of the Holocaust. When Willow and Jana return to Montreal, the past begins to surface.

Ami Sands Brodoff is the award-winning author of three novels and two volumes of stories. Her latest novel, In Many Waters, grapples with our worldwide refugee crisis. The White Space Between, which focuses on a mother and daughter struggling with the impact of the Holocaust, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction (The Vine Award). Bloodknots, a volume of thematically-linked stories, was a finalist for The Re-Lit Award. Ami leads creative writing workshops to teens, adults, and seniors. She has also taught writing to formerly incarcerated women and to people grappling with mental illness. Ami has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and St. James Cavalier Arts Centre (Malta). Ami lives in Montreal. The Sleep of Apples is her third short fiction collection.

Ami Sands Brodoff's profile page

• Winner, Canadian Jewish Book Award (Fiction )

The White Space Between beautifully evokes one family's history and resilience, as it traces the mix of curiosity and self-protection that lead a mother and daughter into the past. The puppeteer heroine and her staunch and wry mother are wonderful, indelible characters, in a novel with a rare sunniness at it's heart.

Joan Silber

...[Brodoff] weaves myth and reality into an honest story where the white spaces are a balm for the woes and wounds of the stories that shape us.

Montreal Review of Books

The White Space Between portrays the fascinating struggle between forgetting and uncovering stunningly powerful and necessary memories, an extraordinary hide-and-seek game of personal and ethnic history. The novel abounds with wisdom and lyrical beauty.

Josip Novakovich

The White Space Between forms a crystalline menorah in one's mind. With meticulous power, Brodoff evinces from the ash and soil of the Holocaust, the transcendent flame of hope, timelessness, and truth. A deeply moving and memorable novel.

Suhayl Saadi

Brodoff allows art to speak the unspeakable softly. Ultimately, she weaves myth and reality into an honest story where the white spaces are a balm for the woes and wounds of the stories that shape us.

The Montreal Review of Books

Ami Sands Brodoff powerfully explores the haunted terrain of memory. Brave in its disclosure of family truths, her latest novel centers on a mother struggling to bury history, while her daughter yearns to uncover it, a journey rich with secrets and reckonings. Brodoff renders this world - a Montreal of eternal snow, a Prague of eternal childhood - as beautifully as a cherished old photograph, once lost, not found.

Denise Roig

The novel examines the way that we create our identities from the stories we tell about our past, and questions the point at which the truth pushes its way out from the safe haven of denial. The structure of the narrative is well-paced and simmers gradually to a fully boil.

Quill & Quire