Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning prison memoir, No Friend But the Mountains, held a mirror to our national conscience and proved art’s potential to force a moral reckoning. Now, in this haunting and lyrical collection, Boochani turns his poetic powers to the emotional truth of fiction. Translated from the Kurdish, Stories from Other Islands moves between remote villages and bustling cities, Kurdistan and the West, traversing the boundaries of memory, exile, and the native grounds from which all our tales emerge. Here, Boochani weaves together the disparate lives of those caught in the currents of history – from a persecuted professor to a legendary mountain rebel, an unwilling soldier to a roaming anthropologist – to explore the mysterious forces that bind people to the past. Infused with folklore, myth, and the music of the tanbour, Stories from Other Islands is a powerful meditation on what it means to be live in a fractured world: a testament to what might yet endure when all that remains is our words, and our memory.
