The Singularity

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.

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.