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 Ismaïl’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.

"'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