Balsam Karam

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.

In an unnamed coastal city home to many refugees, a mother of a displaced family searches for her child, calling her name as she wanders along the cliffside road where her daughter used to work. She searches and searches until, devoid of hope and frantic with grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to this suicide is another woman – on a business trip from a distant country, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers her own litany of losses – of a language, a country, an identity – when once her family fled a distant war. Weaving between both narratives and written in looping prose rich with meaning, The Singularity is an astounding study of grief, migration and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new writers.