Showing results by narrator "Ash Rizi" in All Categories

In 2002, at the age of 19, Azad, a young Kurdish man, was conscripted into Iran’s army and forced to fight against his own people. Refusing to go to war against his fellow Kurds, Azad deserted and smuggled himself to the United Kingdom, where he was granted asylum, became a citizen, and learned English. But more than a decade later, having returned to the Middle East as a social worker in the wake of the Syrian civil war, Azad found that he would have to pick up a weapon once again.

What would you do if you woke up to see a living, breathing, tiny, glowing, pink elephant? If you’re anything like Schoch, who lives on the streets of Zürich and is decidedly down on his luck, you might well think it’s time to put away the bottle before your hallucinations get any stranger and go back to sleep. But what if the tiny pink elephant is still there when you wake up?

What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the postmortem adventures of widower Ian Brown, a man who dies in the book’s first moments and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in “pre-incarnation”. The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their premortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the “Beforelife Delusion”.

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - 'that the hours of his life belong to himself alone'. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

As Syria imploded in civil war in 2011, Kurdish volunteers in the north rose up to free their homeland from centuries of repression and create a progressive sanctuary of tolerance and democracy. To the medievalists of ISIS, this was an affront, so they amassed 10,000 men, heavy artillery, tanks, mortars and ranks of suicide bombers to crush the uprising. Against them stood 2,500 volunteer fighters armed with 40-year-old rifles. There was only one way for the Kurds to survive. They would have to kill the invaders one by one.

Underground, we are at once isolated and connected. We avoid eye contact and conversation while our lives literally intersect with those of strangers. As we stand on the tube, it becomes possible to travel far further than expected - and this sense of possibility lies at the heart of this stunning collection. Twelve writers explore life on the London Underground through eleven short stories and one memoir, commissioned to mark the opening of the Elizabeth line in 2018.

'If a tree falls in a forest and Jon Bon Jovi is with you when it happens, is it still a figment of your imagination?' Johnny Ruin is a literary novel that explores themes of heartbreak and mental health. The novel is set in the mind of the narrator, a surreal United States where each state is a new state of mind: lust, anger, jealousy. Haunted by the idea that he is somehow broken, the narrator, a depressed 30-something writer, embarks on a trip through his own mind with his spirit guide, Jon Bon Jovi, for company.