Description

Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living – without rights, access to care or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with two friends, she revolts against the government’s injustice. Arrested, imprisoned and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a stark choice: a public execution, or participation in an experimental mission that will send her into space, into a black hole known as the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary community back home. Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, and woven with reflections on oppression, solidarity, trauma and loss.

Publisher Review

‘If you ever wonder why fiction matters, read this radiant and defiant book. Nothing confronts the realities of our world more powerfully than a story willing to imagine and extrapolate them so fully. That this vision is readable – bearable, even – is only because it is written with such love, care and formal brilliance in both voice and structure.’

– Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital ‘Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon is a parable for our times. With the power of myth and the lyricism of an epic poem, the novel grapples with so much of what we are witnessing around us across the globe: oppression, torture, migration, division and humans having to negotiate impossible bargains. This philosophical and existential novel had me gripped from beginning to end. Karam’s voice – urgent and essential – penetrates deep and will stay with me.’

– Joanna Pocock, author of Greyhound ‘Event Horizon is a novel that creates its own time, that lives outside rational time and yet feels remarkably timely in the most vital way. Please do read this book.’

– Andrew McMillan, author of Pity ‘Lyrical, furious and strange, Event Horizon takes the novel form and turns it inside out. This is a book that revolts by showing us revolt – unflinchingly, unbearably and lovingly.’

– Helen Charman, author of Mother State ‘Event Horizon reminds us that the revolution is always already over and has always not yet begun. It is a moving, domestic novel about how to make a home and a life while displaced and oppressed, and about what might endure when you are forced to leave it for good.’

– Samuel Fisher, author of Migraine ‘The Singularity, the second novel (and first to be published in English) by Balsam Karam … is evidence of the unique genius of human creativity…. Language is at the heart of The Singularity, moving as it does from chaos and cacophony to the simple purity of a single voice, which is one measure of its brilliance and its beauty.’

– John Self, Observer (praise for The Singularity) ‘The two narratives refract and then come together in a poetic convergence. There is a haunting, hushed tone to the novel, neatly evoked by Saskia Vogel’s translation from the Swedish, that probes the disorienting effects of exile.’

– Anderson Tepper, New York Times (praise for The Singularity) ‘Karam is a terrific prose stylist. Many of her sentences are surprising in their syntactical innovation and unique poetic rhythm. Like Virginia Woolf, Karam is interested in fragments, and in how they can fit and flow together. There is a choral quality to her writing, and a rich philosophical undertow to many of her observations…. The Singularity sweeps us along, offering profound wisdoms on motherhood and migration, war, home and grief.’

– Yagnishsing Dawoor, Times Literary Supplement (praise for The Singularity) ‘Karam infuses this perceptive and compassionate novel with a sense of perplexity that perfectly matches the lives of those she portrays.’

– Declan O’Driscoll, Irish Times (praise for The Singularity )