A mother is searching for her child, walking the streets calling her name. She is searching along the corniche where her daughter used to work. She keeps searching until she loses her mind, frantic with grief, forgetting her other children. What kind of mother could keep on living after the disappearance of her child?

A woman is on vacation, with a baby growing inside her belly, when she sees someone falling off the corniche. Later she will have to give birth to her stillborn child, refusing for as long as possible, imagining that as long as the baby is still inside her, it cannot be entirely lost.

The woman who has lost her baby is thinking about her own mother, remembering how she had once arrived at the parent-teacher meeting wearing the most precious piece of clothing she owned: a black-and-white rabbit fur she had received as a gift. Some of the older kids had pointed at her and laughed. Later, on their way home, she had walked far ahead of her mother. She remembers her mother’s losses: the loss of a language, a country, an identity. Is it possible to create a hierarchy of trauma?

Balsam Karam’s new novel The Singularity is an emotionally powerful and political work of grief, and can be read in adjunction with her radiant debut novel Event Horizon, if you so wish.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2021