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Event Horizon

By (author): Balsam Karam

Translated by: Saskia Vogel

From the acclaimed author of The Singularity comes a unique and daring, formally inventive novel about rebellion, political protest, and a young woman’s firm belief in a better world.

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 some friends, she revolts against the government’s injustice. Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or, as part of an experiment, to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass. She chooses the Mass, opting to face its fathomless depth and loneliness rather than hurt the morale of her weary allies back home. Collapsing and expanding myth and reality, Event Horizon is an exquisite existential work of speculative fiction, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on exile, oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. 

AUTHOR

Saskia Vogel

Saskia Vogel grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s global publicist and as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on pornography and adult pleasure products. She is the author of the novel Permission.


AUTHOR

Balsam Karam

BALSAM KARAM is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author and librarian and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel, Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Smaland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singularity, originally published in Sweden in 2021, was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize.


Awards

  • Katapult Prize 2019, Nominated
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    Details

    Dimensions:

    208 Pages
    8in * 5.25in * 1in
    0.5lb
    .50lb

    Published:

    May 05, 2026

    Publisher:

    Book*hug Press

    ISBN:

    9781771669825

    Book Subjects:

    FICTION / Literary

    Language:

    eng

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    The Singularity

    By (author): Balsam Karam

    Translated by: Saskia Vogel