Balsam Karam

Lyrical and breathtaking, a study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new novelists. 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 in vain until, spent from grief, she throws herself...

Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich, where mothers and daughters, banished from society, make their living—without rights, access to care, or legal status. But Milde refuses to accept the order of things and, together with some friends, she revolts against the government's injustice. Arrested, imprisoned, and tortured, Milde is eventually...