Book premiere: Behzad Karim Kahni: When we were swans

After his acclaimed debut, "Dog Wolf Jackal," Behzad Karim Khani follows up with a second novel. A novel about a dreary country. About the diaspora as home. And about freedom in being a stranger. The boy in question longs for a violence that will leave a hollow with the outline of Germany.

He lives in a housing estate where the kitchens have no extractor fans and the hallways smell of poverty, marjoram and bunk beds. It is the 1990s and he and his family have fled from Iran to the Ruhr region. His mother is a sociologist, his father a writer whose language has fifteen different words for pride. He experiences Germany as an insult; he becomes an observer and exhausts himself trying to understand this country, while his mother believes in progress and progress. His son's anger, on the other hand, becomes more and more unbridled. There i…