Hyper

'A fascinating, thrilling novel' Samira Ahmed, Front Row, BBC Radio 4
‘Brilliant…a book of big, heady ideas’ Guardian
‘A state of the nation novel’ TLS


Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan, has fled Tehran and settled in London. As his three children embrace their new adult lives they each struggle with an increasingly desperate relationship to money:

Siver, the only daughter, escapes into an unhappy marriage in Baghdad before fleeing to raise her daughter as a single mother in Dubai.

Mohammed, the eldest, stays in London to climb the unforgiving ladder of the financial sector.

Laika, the youngest, retreats into a contactless digital life in a condo near Wall Street, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall.

Sharp, topical, and powerful, Hyper is a story about what remains of our humanity in a world increasingly dominated by the flows of capital.

‘Ambitious, epic, heartfelt... I was blown away’ Fredrik Backman
‘A tightly stitched work of melancholy wit and rueful irony… Hyper evokes what it feels like to live now’ Tom Benn
Hyper marks the arrival of a significant, keenly perceptive new voice in literature’ Sam Byers

'A tightly stitched work of melancholy wit and rueful irony that charts the fortunes of one Kurdish family across generations and geolocations. This is an absorbing and satisfying saga, carried by universal emotion, with each of its sibling protagonists in circumstances of increasing desperation, disillusionment, and displacement. Hyper evokes what it feels like to live now: to surf on or surrender to the mercurial waves of global capital

Tom Benn, author of Oxblood

About Agri Ismaïl

Agri Ismaïl is a Kurdish author based in Sweden who has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan. His work has been published in The White Review, The Rumpus, Litro, 3:AM Magazine, and Asymptote amongst other places. His piece 'Haunted Home' won the 2016 Stack award for best non-fiction for The Outpost, runner-up in the Lifted Brow & RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction, and he was longlisted for the 2017/2018 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. Hyper is his first novel.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781529931945
  • Length: 352 pages
  • Price: £9.99
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