The moving story of a daughter’s relationship with her father, of life lived between alien worlds, and of a family and a country in pain.

TERAFIK
by Nilufar Karkhiran Khozani
Blessing/PRH Germany, August 2023

© Erik Weiss

When Nilufar was a young girl, her father moved back to Iran, leaving her behind. Now, for the first time, she travels to his home country to meet the family she never knew. In Tehran, she finds a world of contradictions, and encounters new faces – all of them wounded, and each with their hopes and dreams. Nilufar slowly gets to know the life that might have been her own, yet her father keeps eluding her whenever she tries to get close to him. In the midst of this chaotic and restless city, among the well-meaning relatives who have welcomed her into their home, Nilufar little by little discovers and understands a fragmented country, a fragmented family and her own fragmented identity.

Nilufar Karkhiran Khozani, born in 1983, studied literature, comparative literature and psychology before qualifying as a behavioural therapist. She has contributed to several literary journals, and in 2020 published Romance Would Be a Very Fine Bonus Indeed, a volume of selected verse. She was artist-in-residence at the 2020 Prosanova Festival, and translated the script for Town Bloody Hall: A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation for the German feature Als Susan Sontag im Publikum saß (‘The Time Susan Sontag Was in the Audience’, 2021). TERAFIK is her first novel. She lives in Berlin.