Nordic Book Club, May 2025

Join us in May as we read and discuss Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (2021), translated from the original Swedish by Saskia Vogel (2024). 

From the Publisher (The Feminist Press):

A breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting new novelists.

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 and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives 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 once, her family fled a distant war.

Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this…