Nordic Book Club: 'The Singularity'

Join the Swenson Center's monthly book club to discuss books on Nordic topics or by Nordic authors. 

In May, the group will read "The Singularity" by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel. The book is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting new novelists.

About the book

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.