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
‘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
