From the table of contents, Guanzon had me hooked. This haunting and fiercely passionate story takes America’s capitalist heart to task. Here is an unforgettable accounting of family, fever, and the fortunes of our strip mall society.

—Samantha Hunt

author of The Dark Dark

 

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A tense, yet tender portrait of a father and son trying to escape life on the margin. Determination and despair collide in this unforgettable debut, with an ending that broke my heart.

—Douglas Stuart

author of Shuggie Bain & Young Mungo

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A searing and truthful portrait of American life full of beauty, honesty and unexpected grace.

—Gary Shteyngart

author of Lake Success

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A quest, a page-turner, and above all a love story, Abundance lays bare one father’s brutal, tender hustle to care for his son in a winner-take-all world. Henry’s meticulously plotted journey, unfolding in heart-stopping prose, marks Jakob Guanzon as a debut author with compassion and talent to burn.

—Mia Alvar

author of In the Country

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We live in an era where the richest see their net worth leap by billions as mass unemployment, hunger, and homelessness devastate America. Jakob Guanzon’s remarkable debut offers a deep understanding of a life of precarity, where survival is counted in dollars, dimes, pennies. Abundance is about love and fear, about giving a boy a birthday when you're washing yourself in a fast-food bathroom, and it drills deep into the mind of the brilliantly constructed father, Henry, who must think through every purchase, even as his conflicting impulses toward care and rage threaten to undo his most careful accountings. Tender, anxious, angry, and beautiful—Guanzon has given us The Road for the ongoing apocalypse of American capitalism.

—Mark Doten

author of Trump Sky Alpha

 

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Tender surprises and literary thrill mark Guanzon’s Abundance—underlying the writer’s hard-edged eye, observant prose, and crafty structure is the book’s emotional integrity, anchored in a father’s love. Guanzon looks unflinchingly at our society’s underbelly, the intolerable despair that we tolerate, in this powerful debut: a wrenching book our times demand.

—Gina Apostol

author of Insurrecto

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Abundance is a devastating and urgent novel, a journey into the elegiac and forgotten spaces of an American empire in decline. Through a father’s harrowing struggle to provide a home for his son, Jakob Guanzon has written the everlasting story of exile and inequity in all its fiery desperation, daily heartbreak, and extraordinary tenderness.

—Michael Zapata

author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

 

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A furious and evocative condemnation of the foundation of our society—money—and the cycles of poverty in which so many are trapped. This heart-rending story of an unhoused father’s struggle to provide for his son one dollar, even one penny at a time, in the margins of an American city, will forever change the way readers see our country. Abundance is a great rarity in fiction, a story from the bottom rung of society, written with hard-earned compassion and truth.

—Maxim Loskutoff

author of Ruthie Fear

 

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Jakob Guanzon’s excellent debut novel, Abundance, is the story of a father and son scraping by in a country that relegates its most vulnerable to day-to-day survival. Despite that struggle, Guanzon infuses his characters with spirit and fight, and renders them in prose that is sharp, blunt, and lyrical, all at once. To read Abundance is to understand America in ways both shockingly new and startlingly familiar. Contemporary American fiction is lucky to add this book to its shelves.

—Lysley Tenorio

author of The Son of Good Fortune

 

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