Ministerium der Träume

In the organizer's words:

Nasrin Behzadi is a bouncer at a queer club in Berlin and is hopelessly overwhelmed: After the death of her sister Nushin in a car accident, she has to look after her pubescent daughter and find out whether it really was an accident. Aware of Nushin's depression, Nasrin believes it was suicide, but more and more evidence is also emerging that it was murder. As the police do little to solve the case, Nasrin's only option is to launch a private investigation that leads deeper and deeper into the neo-Nazi milieu - unsurprisingly for her and her family, who fled from a Tehran bomb shelter to West Germany in the early 1980s. During her search for clues, Nasrin is increasingly haunted by memories of her childhood and youth with Nushin in a problematic district of Lübeck, between neighbors hanging up German flags and training sessions of the local migrant Antifa. And then she also has to defend her own hard-won identity as a queer person between worlds with the help of "left-wing radical pedagogy beyond Germanness" against her teenage niece, who is also a bit of a dyke.

With pace, humor and surprising twists, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah's debut novel MINISTRY OF DREAMS tells the story of what it means to grow up in a society of prejudice and exclusion, to build a family of choice and to dream of burning phone booths, incessantly ringing machines and enticing ways out that remain closed to even the most confident doorman.

Ministry of Dreams. Novel by Hengameh Yaghoobifarah © Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co.KG, Berlin 2021