The British government tolerates the Kurds right now. No longer are they consigned by the pens of our diplomats and mandarins to the middens of geopolitics. They excel at killing Islamic State fighters, they keep a lid on the grander imperial daydreams of Mr Erdoğan, they give women equal-ish rights and AK47s. At least here, the Foreign Office can say, Brylcreemed Blairite liberal interventionism worked out all right. No more Halabjas. Drilling rights for British oil. Splendid.
“When it comes to Kurds, the brightest minds consciously make themselves dim,” says Rafiq, patriarch of the Hardi family. A rich doctor in 1970s Baghdad who treated “Marx’s Capital as though it were juvenile love poetry”, he went on to found the Communist party of Kurdistan. Straining under anti-Kurdish persecution, and with customary terrible timing, he fled his homeland’s “century of apostasy and Leninism and nationalism” straight into revolution-era Tehran, necessitating another midnight escape, losing his family wealth in the process and consigning his three children to an émigré childhood of frostbitten weekend demonstrations at London embassies. The book follows the three Hardi children as adults through 2010s Dubai, London and New York as they come to grips with the capitalist world their father failed to defeat. We meet unwilling housewife Siver, desperate banker Mohammed and hacker genius cum digital nomad Laika (named after the unfortunate space dog).
