Showing results by narrator "Ash Rizi" in All Categories

What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the postmortem adventures of widower Ian Brown, a man who dies in the book’s first moments and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in “pre-incarnation”. The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their premortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the “Beforelife Delusion”.

In 2002, at the age of 19, Azad, a young Kurdish man, was conscripted into Iran’s army and forced to fight against his own people. Refusing to go to war against his fellow Kurds, Azad deserted and smuggled himself to the United Kingdom, where he was granted asylum, became a citizen, and learned English. But more than a decade later, having returned to the Middle East as a social worker in the wake of the Syrian civil war, Azad found that he would have to pick up a weapon once again.

What would you do if you woke up to see a living, breathing, tiny, glowing, pink elephant? If you’re anything like Schoch, who lives on the streets of Zürich and is decidedly down on his luck, you might well think it’s time to put away the bottle before your hallucinations get any stranger and go back to sleep. But what if the tiny pink elephant is still there when you wake up?

'If a tree falls in a forest and Jon Bon Jovi is with you when it happens, is it still a figment of your imagination?' Johnny Ruin is a literary novel that explores themes of heartbreak and mental health. The novel is set in the mind of the narrator, a surreal United States where each state is a new state of mind: lust, anger, jealousy. Haunted by the idea that he is somehow broken, the narrator, a depressed 30-something writer, embarks on a trip through his own mind with his spirit guide, Jon Bon Jovi, for company.