Overview

Lyrical and breathtaking, a study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new novelists. In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter's name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches in vain until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman, there on a business trip; she will soon give birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses-of a language, a country, an identity-when her family fled a distant war. In this powerful and moving novel, Balsam Karam offers a fresh approach to language and narrative as she questions our assumptions and perspectives. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a compelling exploration of loss, history, and memory.

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9781922790583

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Reviews

‘Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.’ * Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath * ‘Balsam Karam’s new novel is enormously powerful…To read The Singularity is like drinking directly from a flood of tears.’ * Aftonbladet * ‘I cannot recall anyone else in contemporary Swedish literature who writes like Karam—with remarkable beauty. This could very well conceal the horrors and injustices she portrays, but with Karam that becomes the opposite: inexorably real.’ * Svenska Dagbladet * ‘Balsam Karam’s language is entirely her own. It is poetic and suggestive, sometimes like a single stream-of-consciousness, where two different scenarios are portrayed in parallel. Here and now and at the same time in the past, carrying one’s losses, engraved on the body like deep wounds. This novel asks if traumas can be ranked—the loss of a child, a language, a country, an identity…The Singularity is a journey into a black hole. A point without no return.’ * Jönköpings-Posten * ‘The Singularity is a novel that appears to have been created from dark matter, elusive, giddying and with an enormous linguistic and narrative density.’ * Expressen * ‘This story is about loss. Pressure points where everything is concentrated…Balsam Karam moves…beyond sentimentality. It would only be ridiculous to claim that The Singularity is affecting. If anything, it hits hard. The resistance vibrates both inside and underneath the text. An irrepressible refusal to accept injustices. The Singularity is elegant—and explosive—prose.’ * Arbetarbladet * ‘Disconnection, the exclusion of human beings, is one of several epicentres in The Singularity. Or rather, human beings as consumable goods…Balsam Karam is taking a major step forward in this new novel. Her linguistic exploration is admirable. So is her ability to allow a milieu to exist right on the border between fiction and reality.’ * Borås Tidning * ‘The Singularity is a novel that grows in strength, both in terms of structure and content. The linguistic awareness, as well as the daring stylistic techniques and the experiences described, show that Balsam Karam is an author to reckon with for years to come.’ * Sydsvenskan *

‘Lyrical, devastating and completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam's writing is formally inventive and stylistically breathtaking, and Saskia Vogel's translation does shining justice to its poetic precision and depths.’ * Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath *

Author Information

Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a child. She is an author and librarian and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity, her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021, was nominated for Sweden's August Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 European Union Prize for Literature. Saskia Vogel is a writer, screenwriter, and translator from Swedish and German into English. In 2021 she was awarded the Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature and an English PEN Translates Award and was a PEN American Translation Prize finalist. Vogel is based in Berlin.

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