The Shadeless Border: A Novel
The Shadeless Border: A Novel
Forthcoming, ships September 2026
Jiyar Jahan Fard
Translated by Chiya Parvizpur
Over a single day, a family faces grief and exile and history in a surreal tale set at contested borders.
On one side of the border, Azad’s mother stands in her grief, waiting to bury her son. On the other side, his uncle and cousins wait with his body, barred by unrelenting guards from bringing him home without a passport. Borders are a thousand kinds of violence, a vicious declaration of who belongs and who does not. For generations, the Kurdish people have lived divided by these cruelties, carved out amid the ruins of war and empire. This is The Shadeless Border.
Over the next twenty-four hours at the crossing, an uncanny tale unfolds through a chorus of surprising voices: Death and the Border speak to us like old friends; a coffin and a stringed instrument, both carved from the same tree, remember Azad’s family history. Set at the contested frontier between Iran and Iraq, Jiyar Jahan Fard’s masterpiece is a work of haunting intensity, written along the delicate line between Kafka and Kundera, and tracing the man-made boundaries that define the reality of modern-day Kurdistan.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781945335709
Published: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in
Page count: 249
Other Formats
ISBN: 9781945335853
Format: EPUB
-
“As a novelist of exile and memory, I was struck by The Shadeless Border. Jiyar Jahan Fard transforms a moment of bureaucratic impasse into a powerful and unsettling meditation on grief, displacement, and belonging at the edge of nation-states. Told through a haunting and inventive chorus of voices—human and nonhuman alike, from a grieving family to the objects that carry their dead—the novel moves fluidly between stark realism and myth. In doing so, it reveals how intimately personal loss is entangled with political histories, and how borders inscribe themselves onto both the living and the dead. Lyrical, formally daring, and emotionally resonant, The Shadeless Border is a poignant exploration of Kurdish experience and a compelling reflection on the fragility of home—where even the dead cannot easily return, and memory itself becomes a form of resistance.” —Essmat Sophie, author of Dancing Amid Fire, Rising Above Ruins
“Offers a rare and intimate window into the lived experience of Kurdish communities whose daily realities are shaped by displacement, exclusion, and state violence. It is a sincere and compelling work of fiction that addresses one of the central traumas of Kurdish modernity: the enduring impact of borders drawn without regard for the people they divide. In doing so, it enriches the growing body of Kurdish literature in translation and invites global audiences to engage with the complexities and resilience of a culture too often silenced.” —Hashem Ahmadzadeh, Nation and Novel: A Study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse
-
Words Without Borders, The Watchlist: July 2026: The Shadeless Border reckons with a host of very immediate issues, most notably the borders between nations and the people affected by them.
Reactor Mag, Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2026: "[A]n evocative work and a chronicle of the current condition of Kurdistan.”
-
Jiyar Jahan Fard is a Kurdish writer and activist from Kermanshah who writes in Kalhori Kurdish. He was forced into exile for expressing and publishing his beliefs and endured imprisonment and torture. He now resides in Germany.
His works include several collections of short stories and novels. Jahan Fard is recognized as a prominent figure who documents and publishes Kurdish folklore and cultural heritage in Iran. His book The Shadeless Border sheds light on the issues faced by Kurdish citizens due to the Iraq-Iran border, which has separated Kurdish people from each other.
Jiyar Jahan Fard is a member of PEN and lives in Munich as a Writer-in-Exile fellow from 2018 to 2021.
Chiya Parvizpur is a Kurdish writer and translator working in both Kurdish and English. His work has been published by Transnational London Press, Whisper House Press, Henar Press, and Common Notions. He is currently writing his third novel.
Radhika Singh
Fiction / Anticolonial Politics
Love and revolution in a crumbling world order.
Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere—crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers’ uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines.
Roma’s life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The ‘cell’ opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future–and the potential to hack AI warfare—propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance.
As dreams and dialectics converge, Roma meditates on the role of faith, ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.