Balsam Karam | Event Horizon

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.

‘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