Gābor

Told through contradicting, unreliable narrators and almost entirely in dialogue, Seyed Qader Hedayati's GABOR fuses the experimentation of George Saunders with the absurdist satire of Joseph Heller to deliver a seldom explored portrait of friendship and boyhood under the anarchy of occupation.

In a Kurdish village under military occupation, a group of boys scrape together their savings and buy a hand-stitched football to prove they aren't losers to the other kids. When it lands inside the opposing military base, Karim sneaks in and takes it back—only for the soldiers to burn the neighborhood to the ground looking for it. Streets are bombed, homes are raided, snipers take aim at pedestrians, residents are dragged off and imprisoned. As the casualty rate skyrockets, Karim and his friends retaliate by firing junkyard scraps from their slingshots while raging bulls escape slaughterhouses to stampede into warfare.

"Each chapter unfolds like a surreal hero's quest as we follow the children's unstoppable yearnings for things as mundane as a soccer ball and a comic book. I found myself laughing, wincing, and cheering these boys on as they take ever greater risks for the most basic of human needs: dignity. As one of the boys says after discovering a forbidden book of Kurdish poems: It opened doors, a fire lit inside. That is what GABOR does-it cracks open the door, it shines a light on characters who are usually erased from our sight."—Aisha Abdel Gawad, author of Between Two Moons, shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize

"With its youthful, sympathetic anti-heroes, and their bizarre war over a soccer ball with a hostile army, GABOR, is a strangely compelling account of the absurdity of war and the difficulty of Kurdish identity under occupation.”—Alan Ali Saeed