Event Horizon - Paperback

by Balsam Karam (Author), Saskia Vogel (Translator)

From the author of The Singularity, a saga of one girl's resistance and exile in the stars and soil of empire.

Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich and mothers and daughters make their living banished from society--without rights, access to care, or legal status. Simmering under the surface of their day-to-day survival is a desire for change--and one day, Milde and her friends act on it, setting fire to government buildings in the city that has rejected them.

When Milde is framed as the instigator of the uprising, she is arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass, for an experiment. Milde chooses the Mass.

Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflection on oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. With a completely unique voice, Balsam Karam writes about the swirl of hope and despair in the lives of the marginalized and a young woman's unwavering belief in a better world.

Author Biography

Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian, and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity, was published in Sweden in 2021 and was shortlisted for the August Prize.

Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission and the translator of over twenty Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.