In Event Horizon, Balsam Karam’s first novel but her second to be published in English, a group of single mothers and their daughters, all of whom are undocumented deportees, set up a commune in a mountainous region they call the Outskirts.

Ten years later, one of the girls, seventeen-­year-old Milde, revolts against the appalling conditions in which they’re forced to live by setting fire to government buildings in the city. She is sentenced to death by public execution but, rather than damage her community’s morale, agrees to be sent into space, where she enters a black hole known as the Mass. Milde’s slow death, we are told, will provide data for ‘the world’s most advanced scientific experiment’. Her cooperation is contingent on the Outskirts benefiting from ‘better conditions’, including the supply of books and writing materials. From Earth, her old neighbours gaze at the stars and wave. ‘Smile and remember her,’ they tell each other. ‘She remembers and misses us back.’

Karam – a Swedish writer of Iranian Kurdish descent – examines loneliness, fear and isolation. In Saskia Vogel’s hypnotic translation, Milde goes through every emotional extreme. ‘I know my home as a gulp of cold water and as every mountain at the moment dusk obscures the sun,’ she says. At