The Singularity
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Karam's beautiful and harrowing English-language debut, a pregnant woman witnesses another woman plummet to her death from a promenade above the sea. Both women are unnamed, as is the cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly city where the action takes place. Karam repeatedly portrays the suicidal jump from both women's points of view, and in the process gradually reveals more about each character. The dead woman arrived in the city as a refugee from an unnamed war-torn country with her four children. She was becoming increasingly despondent in her search for her oldest daughter, 17, who worked at a nearby restaurant overlooking the water and has been missing for several weeks. The woman who bears witness to the mother's death is from the same country and has relocated to the city to take an unspecified job. She's pregnant, and Karam's account of her determination to leave her home country before giving birth overlaps thematically with the dead woman's story, especially after the witness's baby is stillborn. The slim, subtle, and somewhat abstract narrative gestures at grand tragedy in its depiction of the indifferent metropolis as "a hole between what came to be and what could have been," where tourists pay little mind to a refugee's for her missing daughter. This is powerful.
