REVIEWS
”Agri Ismaïl masters the novel form like few debut authors. In over four hundred pages he never loses focus, sharpness or pace, it’s masterful. I would call HYPER a masterpiece.” – Expressen
”I would be surprised if HYPER is not nominated for a number of debutante awards and even the August Prize this year. Rarely has a Swedish debut novel been so tightly narrated and with a clear idea, without ever losing the human gaze on the characters (...) I am deeply impressed” – Borås Tidning
”[It is] both a rich novel of ideas and a moving family saga (…) [Ismaïl] portrays engaging characters with emotional acuity and simultaneously evokes the hyperreality of life in the first decade of the twenty-first century” – Times Literary Supplement
”[Agri Ismaïl’s debut] is a brilliant conceit, and this is a book of big, heady ideas: how 20th-century concepts of communism and solidarity have been run through the digital shredder of the 21st century.” – The Guardian
PUBLISHERS’ STATEMENTS
“HYPER is one of the most ambitious and impressive debut novels I have ever read. It reminds me of the early systems novels of Don DeLillo, but Agri Ismaïl has invented a global idiom all of his own, ingeniously using the story of a Kurdish family fractured by migration to explore the dislocations of life under capitalism. It calls to mind the work of literary giants as diverse as Mohsin Hamid, Patricia Lockwood, Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith and Viet Thanh Nguyen. We have a stunning cover design featuring a rug by Faig Ahmed that perfectly encapsulates the disentangling of tradition in a contemporary (very online) world. This is both a novel for our times and a novel for all time.”
- Kaiya Shang, Chatto & Windus
”Agri Ismaïl’s HYPER is nothing less than a world class first novel. An incredibly absorbing and insanely ambitious novel of ideas – and of the more limited than great expectations of one family – that is rich with political history, social criticism and hypermodern satire. It made me think of novels like Jonathan Franzen’s FREEDOM or Zadie Smith’s WHITE TEETH, but with the edge of Michel Houellebecq or Bret Easton Ellis. Reading it, I couldn’t believe that it was a debut.”
- Johanna Haegerström, Albert Bonniers Förlag
"HYPER is a novel about exile – and about money. Agri Ismaïl's impressive, timely debut is shaped by the realities of our globalised world; through the fate of two generations of a Kurdish family, he explores the flows of people and the flows of capital. In doing so, Ismaïl proves to be a great literary talent with a voice all his own, who has succeeded in writing a captivating, beautifully crafted novel with fascinating characters."
- Sarah Houtermans, Rowohlt
