Read an Excerpt from SYNCOPATION, the Extraordinary New Novel-in-Verse from Whitney French

In the wildly creative novel-in-verse, Syncopation (Wolsak & Wynn), the future feels both strange and close at hand. After a devastating Memory War, the world has split into unfamiliar cultures and uneasy alliances, with a geography shaped by acid rain and long-running earthquakes, and economies built around salvaged food, labour, and remembered lives.

The story follows two young women trying to find direction in this fractured landscape. O, descended from space pirates, feels pulled toward the sky and the promise of escape. Z is rooted to the ground, surviving through foraging and black market connections. As companions and lovers, they move through retrofitted garages, factories, and transit hubs, until their journey leads them to el Corazón space station, where loyalty, desire, and belief collide and a single choice changes everything.

Written by notable emerging author Whitney French, Syncopation unfolds using rhythm and lyric intensity to explore memory as power, love as risk, and survival as a political act. The book builds a future that echoes our present, touching on migration, labour, and loss, while holding on to the fragile hope that something new can still be made from the ruins.

We're thrilled to share an excerpt from this unique new work, right here on Open Book!

An Excerpt from SYNCOPATION by Whitney French

faint tremble: a duplex

she is engrossed by a kiss
blackblue in tone, O’s skin drenched in a roar

skinning the earth, a roar: black & blue atones for blood spilled, an eight-year, nine-year war

bodies spilling into cracks, year-after-year blood
& dust – collapsing the tunnel, suffers seismic waves

travellers turn to dust collapsing into tunnels, waves of suffering another tremor, the first in eleven years

another terror, the last in eleven years
since the Great Quake, scientists predict

the quake weakens greatly since scientists predict the surface will settle, an epicentre shifting

O shifting her own surface, her epicentre settling into
another kiss & she is engrossed.

faint tremble: a kiss

“we need to go.”

“now?”

“now.”
“how are you so sure?”

“i hear it.”
“what, there’s nothing. they aren’t expecting another tremor for a
few more years & not in our quadrant at least.”

“Z!”

an odd stirring in Z, a gulf in logic to trust this stranger.

“i hear it.”

O snatches Z’s hand, shepherds them
into the slog, against a current of bodies.
on the walls, fading tiles of bygone symbols
a maple leaf, some stripes, some stars.

“this is stupid, we are backtracking.
if you want to go back, be my guest
but we’re losing ground not gaining . . .”

O kisses Z, a fury, with hardness & promise.

“i won’t leave you here.”

“& what if you’re wrong?”

“you felt that? on my mouth?”

“i did.”

“you’ve never kissed a Neo-Griot, huh? “

& then deadly serious:

“we are not wrong about these things.”

soon enough, others reverse & O has no time
to rejoice in the fact that she isn’t the only
one with good sense, good sound.

they pick up speed.
Z drops a satchel, (near) soundlessly

“forget it.”
“but it’s all the money we have!”

“doesn’t matter.”

Z is fuming
until the earth cracks open.

parched

I.

at last, she is a convert to danger, the entrance of the tunnel
crescents ahead yet not soon enough, Z’s stomach
clenches, her bowels sense an unfolding & air thickens.
ground below showers over their bodies, sky twists

below as whooping & ringing batter them, until it suddens:
life, breaking up with so many so casually – the harsh din
aligns with those in the crowd who no longer hold a pulse
O & Z tread above debris, dust, blood, cement, more dust

plunge into sizzling stone, crumbling walls, brown water, tongues
axed, bloodied, while gravity troubles until it . . . . . . . . . . suddens:
sharpened against upheaval, chaos thunders once more, again with
the screaming earth, as travellers pump out of tunnels like

panicked chattel. somehow, they both break past the threshold
of disaster. running, sky deepening into a colt colouring,
catastrophe slipping off their skins as they journey, far enough
out – dirt-battered, hearing the echo from the massive crack

in air, a fierce breeze beats them to a kneel. behold
the smouldering ruins, both are astonished to have crawled
away, undevoured. O’s tongue expands in her mouth
a realization: Z hands her a water canister strapped to her chest.

i’m okay, she waves away. doubt that, Z quips. women in their twenties
hobbling like crones, tight joints, hacking, hunched silhouettes, both
indulge in whatever liquid remains, quenched post-peril.
a haze of cloud spreads wide, a blistering sun assaults

turning away, almost on cue
from the tunnel reduced to rubble.

Syncopation. Copyright Whitney French, 2026. Excerpt printed by permission of Wolsak & Wynn.

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Whitney French (she/her) is a writer, educator and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers' Sojourn into the Dark (Penguin Random House, 2022). Whitney is a Black futurist who explores memory, loss, technology and nature in her work. She is a certified arts educator and an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of British Colombia. She is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada.