Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel

From the acclaimed author of The Singularity comes a unique and daring 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 novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflections on exile, oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. 

Praise for Event Horizon

“In prose as striking and effective as poetry, Event Horizon beautifully shows us what’s worth fighting for and just how hard it is to do so. A novel that cries out against injustice in the key of everyday life. Balsam Karam draws on her history and experience to create another world and invites us in. I will be thinking about the Outskirts for a long time to come.” —Jacob Wren, author of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“Balsam Karam has the uncanny ability to take today’s daunting concerns—our eco-anxiety, our growing economic inequalities, our powerlessness against the politics that continue to derail our lives—and feed them back to us as mythic dystopias, netherworlds of hypnotic speculation electrified by thrilling poetic tension.” —Dimitri Nasrallah, author of Hotline

“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

“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

“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, Booker Prize–winning 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