Hyper

Hyper

Summary

Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his family.

In London, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness.
The lives of Rafiq’s three children becoming increasingly dependent on their 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, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street.

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

Perfect for fans of Zadie Smith, Moshin Hamid, and Jennifer Egan.

Delicious, harrowing, gutting, hilarious, and deeply necessary, Hyper is a masterpiece.’ Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album

Reviews

  • '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 the author

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.
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