It is our pleasure to announce that Balsam Karam’s critically acclaimed novel The Singularity has been acquired by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Text Publishing in Australia. This follows other recent sales to Solum/Bokvennen in Norway and Kievenaar in the Netherlands.
Tamara Sampey-Jawad at Fitzcarraldo Editions: Balsam’s focus on diasporic experience is one that interests me on a personal level but it is in particular the manner with which she deals with the topic – obliquely, yet all the more direct for this destabilising approach – that most attracts me to her writing. The prose too is looping and dense with meaning, beautifully unravelling trauma and memory at a personal level to reveal the power imbalances and injustices that exist on a wider societal level.
Penny Hueston at Text Publishing: Books by and about women’s experience are so important, and Balsam’s work is simply a marvellous example of what the best literature can do—it is writing that changes the way we see the world. I still carry both women from this novel with me, the woman from the cornice and the pregnant women are unforgettable characters, whose losses becomes ours. These intensely personal stories of dislocation and disintegration will definitely resonate here.
Earlier this year, The Singularity was shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature, as well as the August Prize and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize.