Hyper

'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

'Ambitious and intricate, panoramic in scope yet alive to the intimate details of everyday existence, Hyper marks the arrival of a significant, keenly perceptive new voice in literature'

Sam Byers, author of Perfidious Albion

A book of big, heady ideas… captured in intense, minute, unflinching detail. Ismaïl is very strong on the interior desolation of immigrants…showing a collapsed family unit that doesn’t know it’s collapsed

Guardian

'A fascinating, thrilling novel'

Samira Ahmed, Front Row, BBC Radio 4

Both a rich novel of ideas and a moving family saga… Hyper is notable for the fully rounded characters it brings to life… Agri Ismaïl is a master of dramatic tension, too

Times Literary Supplement

'A novel in the truest sense. Ambitious, epic, heartfelt... I was blown away.'

Fredrik Backman