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 & searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman-on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives 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 once, her family fled a distant war. 

Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel & offers a fresh approach to language & aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, & memory-an experience akin to 'drinking directly from a flood of tears' (Aftonbladet).

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“Lyrical, devastating, & completely original, The Singularity is a work of extraordinary vision and heart. Balsam Karam’s writing is formally inventive & stylistically breathtaking,...” — Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath 

“Balsam Karam writes at the limits of narrative, limning the boundary of loss where ‘no space remains between bodies in the singularity.’ With a lucid intimacy, Karam braids a story of witness & motherhood that fractures from within only to rebuild memory & home on its own terms. The Singularity is a book of conviction, where those who have been made to disappear find light & keep their secrets too.” — Shazia Hafiz Ramji, author of Port of Being  

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Balsam Karam is a Kurdish author living in Sweden.

Saskia Vogel is a writer, screenwriter, & translator from Swedish & German into English.