PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Agri Ismail 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.
'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 * ‘Ismaïl destroys the concept of the “international family saga” by feeding it through the 21st-century capitalist shredder. Funny, tender, ultramodern and brilliant.' * Ruby Cowling, author of The Paradise * 'A satire of capitalism, a parable of money, a saga of 'statelessness' and diaspora, and a most heartfelt chronicle of fractured families. Delicious, harrowing, gutting, hilarious, and deeply necessary, Hyper is a masterpiece.’ * Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album * Hyper weaves parallel worlds into a broken tapestry of finance, familial disruption and the remnants of internationalist aspirations. Flash crashes briefly illuminate desperate journeys over borders, Dubai malls and the US armoured vehicles of Baghdad. It is not only the best but also the most contemporary novel I've read for a long time. * Hito Steyerl *
