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.
Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background—murdered drug-dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity—becomes a key to doors he didn’t even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer. As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there’s not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn’t seem to care about Javi’s newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after graduating, a viral essay transforms Javi from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his “unique perspective.” But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once he’s released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi’s charade, or will it all come crumbling down? A sendup of virtue signaling and tear-jerking trauma plots, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.
An amnesiac slave girl struggles to learn about her past—and secure a future outside the oppressive society that binds her. A female adventurer confronts danger as she searches for her lost mother. A wife struggles within a marriage to a man she does not want. How does a woman survive, maintain her sense of self in such a place? A world of female characters whose emotional journeys are intimately intertwined, where identity and history, language and perception, sexuality and oppression, unite them in their search for meaning, human connection, and ultimately, freedom.
The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.