When Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan, is forced to flee Tehran for London with his family, they suffer the shame of penury and migration layered on Kurdish statelessness. Agri Ismail's electrifying debut novel follows the lives of Rafiq's three 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.
At once a subversion of the family saga and a love letter to the systems novel, Hyper is a story about what remains of our humanity in a world increasingly dominated by the flows of capital.