White Spaces by Elvin James Mensah

White Spaces is a novel about friendship, as four Black men come of age in London in 2012. Teddy is an editor at a major music magazine, seemingly living the dream even though it seems magazines are getting less and less popular. Regardless, he has his best friends (and old school friends) around him: Nathan who is trying to make money to support his son; Kain, who now works with Nathan but is afraid to come out as bisexual; and Birch, always the unpredictable one of the group, seemingly flitting through life without a care in the world. His friends mean the world to Teddy, but as they all struggle with complications in their lives, he has to face what might happen if they weren’t always able to be there for each other.

I’d not read anything by Mensah before, but was drawn in by the blurb of this book. It was a lot more emotional than I expected, as I was assuming it would be a fairly detached, literary take on these men’s lives, but instead, the narrative really focuses on them as individual characters and their emotions. It’s such a gripping read due to this real sense of connection with the characters, meaning that I ended up reading the book in two sittings. The story itself is heartbreaking and yet also not despairing, but looking for hope in whatever happens.

I really loved how the characters’ sexualities were presented and explored, with everyone having very different experiences and the narrative giving these all space. In particular, Teddy’s asexuality and his ways of communicating how important the love in friendship is to him was an element that felt very refreshing to see in contemporary literary fiction, not shying away from not only showing a character who doesn’t want sexual or romantic relationships, but having him explicitly talking about this fact with people.

There’s so much packed into this novel, with every character dealing with their own very real issues (one note I will give for potential readers is  that this book deals a lot with eating disorders, so be aware of that going in). I didn’t want to leave these characters behind and reading White Spaces made me immediately want to go and read Mensah’s earlier novel Small Joys.