HYPER

Three siblings navigate their relationships with money.

The way that money tends to ruin lives is at the heart of Ismaïl’s debut novel. The book, set mostly between 2009 and 2011, follows the three children of Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, a Kurdish communist activist, and his wife, the long-suffering Xezal. The family fled from Kurdistan to Iran, and then to London just before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Daughter Siver Hama Hardi marries an Iraqi man, Karim, but leaves him and moves to Dubai with their daughter after he says he wants a second wife. Her stay in that country, where she works as a salesperson at a designer store, is beset by bad luck, and she finds herself struggling to make ends meet. Mohammed Hama Hardi is better off in London, where he makes good money as a manager at a trading firm, but his job runs his life; still, his employment “made him forget that his job consisted of making money for other people, made him grateful that they gave him the honour of making them money.” Laika Hama Hardi lives a reclusive life in Occupy Wall Street–era New York, where he earns cash off a mirror-trading algorithm he designed, but he has become an Internet-poisoned shell of a man. Ismaïl brilliantly changes tone between each section of the novel: Siver’s story is told with an aching wistfulness, while Mohammed’s is marked with an arch sense of humor that brings to mind both Kingsley and Martin Amis. Laika’s story, meanwhile, is a claustrophobic catalog of his days spent on social media, YouTube, and webcam model sites; the emptiness of his life is heartbreakingly sad. This is a searing, nearly flawless novel that evokes Paddy Chayefsky at his angriest—it’s a hell of an accomplishment from an author who looks to be at the start of a brilliant career.

A bitter yet compassionate tour de force.