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When Rafiq Kermanj, founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his conservative wife Xezal and three children, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness. Agri Ismail''s unforgettable debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq''s children and their 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, designing the trading algorithms that will ultimately prove his downfall in a condo near Wall Street. The siblings are so distant from one another that they no longer even share the same language: Siver''s world is presented in sparse fragments of contemporary auto-fiction, freely jumping from past to present; Mohammed''s in a hysterical realism reflecting London after the stock market crash; and Laika''s in a kinetic prose that emulates the speed and rhythms of the internet, a new topic always a click away. At once a love letter to the systems novel and a subversion of the family saga, Hyper uses the unsettled nature of the Kurdish diaspora to capture the dislocations of life under capitalism.
Report
'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
