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.
Event Horizon
Translated by Saskia Vogel
French paperback with flaps, 216 pages
Published 23 April 2026
Event Horizon
Translated by Saskia Vogel
On Earth in a place like any other, where a gridded city reached for the sea with wide beaches that sometimes repelled the sea and sometimes invited it in, one of the mothers of the Outskirts had been kneeling in the lantern light on the boardwalk, pushing a bicycle chain into place.
As always at night, she’d just risen from the ground any ground and shaken the sand and shells from her sweater – the starry sky black and infinite had revealed itself and her finger had followed Ursa Major towards Orion and Ursa Minor and onwards to Gemini and Virgo, and stopped at Venus, bigger and brighter than ever before.
She studied the stars in the sky and in the torch light made careful notes on the span of the sky and the celestial bodies’ activities on this night, first noting the date and time then recording every difference from the previous night worth recording (not many) and divining the conditions for tomorrow night (very good) and what the stars were saying on the whole about the state of the world as it was right that moment (surprisingly much).
Soon the glittering gold notebook Essa had given her was full and once again she’d have to carry off white paper bags from shops in town and, in the light of the only lantern in the Outskirts, measure, cut and bind her own notebooks to have with her wherever she went. Every birthday she asked Essa how she’d been able to afford this, and every year Essa answered with only a kiss and two cups of hot coffee for them to take to the slope in the afternoon light, sitting down where the bushes along
the slope thickened just as the sky raised the mist above the Outskirts and let it fall into twilight.
Here at the boardwalk, the sky was still bright with stars and the road leading out empty and smooth. She tucked her notebook away and picked up a full bicycle basket from the sand, pedalling slowly as she set off along the road, polishing as she went the fruits – found in rubbish bins around the city – to a gleam against her sweater now in tatters across her body. She nibbled the ripe plums she’d pinched from the greengrocer’s stand which she’d once owned and thought warm thoughts of Pepe and his cart.
Maybe Pepe had noticed her walking around the stand, from one side to the other, earlier in the day right as the afternoon crowd grew denser and bag after bag was held out to him for weighing and payment; maybe he’d flinched when she, having snuck around the watermelons and swedes, suddenly appeared in line with the ears of corn ten for two and plums both yellow and pink; maybe he’d wanted to say something but stopped himself, not sure if she wanted to be seen or intended to come and go unnoticed. She’d been sneaking, that much was true, but she wasn’t ashamed of what she was doing; there was no shame in taking what you needed, and besides, who but Pepe would let her help herself to the earth’s bounty, just like she had offered him that one day when it was still her stand? Here you go, is what she’d said, arms outstretched as if in an embrace, and Pepe had watched as she turned and like now began to make her slow way to the Outskirts.
Early summer, the jasmine shrubs in bloom along the streets leading out of the city. This mother of the Outskirts, once a greengrocer, was now on her way home to those she loved and that loved her back, and everywhere she felt as if from the warming world to the embracing trees and everything in between she was wished well. The rats that had spent the day hiding from white tourist feet crept carefully along the road and struck by tenderness she tossed them two soft tomatoes and her half-eaten plum. Take it, she said quietly and cycled on, enjoy.
She wasn’t aware of this, but later that same night she’d be the last of the mothers to see Milde alive as she cycled past the disused execution site and noticed it was illuminated.
During the day, the nooses hung high enough to catch the eyes of passers-by when a gust sent them swaying over the wall, but now – just as the sun was beginning to rise – two of the four floodlights were on and a white van was parked outside.
The greengrocer stopped, leaned her bike against the wall, climbed onto the saddle to take a look.
There was a woman, young, gaunt. Surrounded by two white men and another two beside. She had short hair and an eye patch, hands tied behind her back.
One of the men, a boy, tore off the patch and handed it to the other. He addressed her, waited for a reply. She replied, but what did she say? Impossible to hear and soon the exchange was over.
The boy fitted a dark cloth over the woman’s head and took off her slippers. He led her to the noose, white as chalk, and the woman held her head high as it was tightened.
All was early summer yet, and now – as before – the jasmine was jasmine and the sky was streaked blue-green and every dawn henceforth was bound to this.
From that place came no sound other than the men’s voices as this mother once greengrocer climbed down from the saddle and rushed away from there.
‘If you ever wonder why fiction matters, read this radiant and defiant book. Nothing confronts the realities of our world more powerfully than a story willing to imagine and extrapolate them so fully. That this vision is readable – bearable, even – is only because it is written with such love, care and formal brilliance in both voice and structure.’
— Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital
‘Balsam Karam’s Event Horizon is a parable for our times. With the power of myth and the lyricism of an epic poem, the novel grapples with so much of what we are witnessing around us across the globe: oppression, torture, migration, division and humans having to negotiate impossible bargains. This philosophical and existential novel had me gripped from beginning to end. Karam’s voice – urgent and essential – penetrates deep and will stay with me.’
— Joanna Pocock, author of Greyhound
‘Balsam Karam writes from the fringes of space, the frothing sea, the borders of despair and state-enforced terror. Her prose shines like glass. Fabulistic and dreamy, it lingers long past first reading. Event Horizon exposes the serrated edge of girlhood, plunging into the black holes that consume rebels and outsiders.’
— Momtaza Mehri, author of Bad Diaspora Poems
‘Event Horizon is a novel that creates its own time, that lives outside rational time and yet feels remarkably timely in the most vital way. Please do read this book.’
— Andrew McMillan, author of Pity
‘Lyrical, furious and strange, Event Horizon takes the novel form and turns it inside out. This is a book that revolts by showing us revolt – unflinchingly, unbearably and lovingly.’
— Helen Charman, author of Mother State
‘Event Horizon reminds us that the revolution is always already over and has always not yet begun. It is a moving, domestic novel about how to make a home and a life while displaced and oppressed, and about what might endure when you are forced to leave it for good.’
— Samuel Fisher, author of Migraine
Praise for The Singularity
‘The Singularity, the second novel (and first to be published in English) by Balsam Karam … is evidence of the unique genius of human creativity…. Language is at the heart of The Singularity, moving as it does from chaos and cacophony to the simple purity of a single voice, which is one measure of its brilliance and its beauty.’
— John Self, Observer (praise for The Singularity)
‘The two narratives refract and then come together in a poetic convergence. There is a haunting, hushed tone to the novel, neatly evoked by Saskia Vogel’s translation from the Swedish, that probes the disorienting effects of exile.’
— Anderson Tepper, New York Times (praise for The Singularity)
‘Karam is a terrific prose stylist. Many of her sentences are surprising in their syntactical innovation and unique poetic rhythm. Like Virginia Woolf, Karam is interested in fragments, and in how they can fit and flow together. There is a choral quality to her writing, and a rich philosophical undertow to many of her observations…. The Singularity sweeps us along, offering profound wisdoms on motherhood and migration, war, home and grief.’
— Yagnishsing Dawoor, Times Literary Supplement (praise for The Singularity)
Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity was shortlisted for the August Prize and is her first English-language publication.
