Dark Matter – a Love Story
On the morning after the annual May festival, a girl is found near-dead beneath the fig tree at the edge of Campo, a labour settlement patrolled by Mister and his men. She is taken in by the residents of the Sunflower Cabin—who feed her, heal her, love her, and teach her how to live again. Her name is Mende. They become her family. And then one day, she vanishes.
Months later, a boy arrives, worn and bruised, calling her name. He is her younger brother. Together with the people who once saved Mende, he sets out to find her—and to understand why she left and where she might have gone.
Mörk materia / Dark Matter is the third and final instalment in Balsam Karam’s space-themed trilogy. Woven with collective memory, oral storytelling, and the quiet force of political resistance, it is a novel about love as a radical act, about caretaking as survival, and about how gravity—whether physical, emotional, or historical—cannot be escaped but may still be transformed.
This is a novel of migration and mourning, of labour and rebellion, of memory and cosmic longing. The language is poetic yet grounded, with echoes of Morrison, and suffused with a fierce tenderness that renders the most brutal realities both intimate and infinite.
Balsam Karam, b. 1983, is a Swedish-Kurdish novelist and librarian, celebrated for her lyrical, boundary-pushing prose. She debuted with Händelsehorisonten / Event Horizon (2018), shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and awarded Smålits migrantpris, and followed with Singulariteten / The Singularity (2021), nominated for the August Prize and shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature. Her…
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About the book
On the morning after the annual May festival, a girl is found near-dead beneath the fig tree at the edge of Campo, a labour settlement patrolled by Mister and his men. She is taken in by the residents of the Sunflower Cabin—who feed her, heal her, love her, and teach her how to live again. Her name is Mende. They become her family. And then one day, she vanishes.
Months later, a boy arrives, worn and bruised, calling her name. He is her younger brother. Together with the people who once saved Mende, he sets out to find her—and to understand why she left and where she might have gone.
Mörk materia / Dark Matter is the third and final instalment in Balsam Karam’s space-themed trilogy. Woven with collective memory, oral storytelling, and the quiet force of political resistance, it is a novel about love as a radical act, about caretaking as survival, and about how gravity—whether physical, emotional, or historical—cannot be escaped but may still be transformed.
This is a novel of migration and mourning, of labour and rebellion, of memory and cosmic longing. The language is poetic yet grounded, with echoes of Morrison, and suffused with a fierce tenderness that renders the most brutal realities both intimate and infinite.
