Liquid

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'Sexy, sly, daring' Justin Torres, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts

'The smoothest, smartest book I’ve read in quite some time' Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

'Loving, cutting, mournful, and hilarious' Bryan Washington award-winning author of Family Meal and Memorial

‘My career had gone nowhere. My love life was non-existent. And as for s*x – here I was, home alone on a Saturday night with a chick flick playing on my laptop because I didn’t own a TV. You can draw your own conclusions.’

Our protagonist always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. But a couple of years on from earning a fancy PhD, she’s still broke, single and stuck in a job going nowhere. One option remains: marry rich.

Her summer becomes a whirlwind of dating: martinis with a lazy heir, board games with a butch producer and a Venmo request from a ‘socialist’ trust-fund babe. However, when some unexpected and tragic news takes her – and her project – to Tehran she is forced to ask and answer some overdue questions about family, connection and, terrifyingly, her own purpose in life and in love.

A riveting spin on a classic romantic comedy, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss and belonging in a gorgeous high-wire voice that explodes off the page with wit, verve and originality.

Hirsute, heuristic, and humorous, Liquid is an electric read. From Los Angeles to Tehran, past to present, academia to the bedsheets, Rahmani navigates these journeys with undeniable verve, serious street-smarts, and a glowing charismatic cool. The smoothest, smartest book I’ve read in quite some time and the dawning of a literary force.

Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

I love this book. After hilariously tearing through the faux-profundity of so many of our cultural fixations—from Los Angeles, to academia, to rom-coms—the novel moves to Tehran, and slowly morphs into a touching examination of vulnerability, dislocation, grief, and longing. Underneath the posturing and razor-sharp wit, we find the yearning heart and hard-won intelligence of a young woman who has found herself adrift. I couldn't stop thinking about Liquid—sexy, sly, daring, and utterly brilliant. Mariam Rahmani is the most exciting new writer I've read in ages.

Justin Torres, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts and We the Animals

Pleasures of nearly every variety abound in Mariam Rahmani’s astonishing Liquid, a novel whose force seeps into the bloodstream, dilating thinking on desire and ambition, of the relations that entangle and unmake us, alongside the traces of unknowability that sustain. Pages erupt with blazing intelligence, pathos, and stringent wit. How rare it is to encounter this marriage of sociological richness with a poet’s staggering feel for the capacity of language, its lush contours and bite. Traversing the streets of LA and Tehran with Rahmani at the wheel awakens sensations and appetites for which one has no name. Liquid is a potent, shimmering revelation, and Rahmani is a writer you proselytize for.

Jenny Xie, author of the National Book Award Finalists The Rupture Tense and Eye Level

About Mariam Rahmani

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction, essays and translations have appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, n+1 and elsewhere. Her first translation was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker. Rahmani holds a PhD from UCLA and an MFA from Columbia, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She teaches at Bennington College.

Details

Imprint: Doubleday
Published: 15/05/2025
ISBN: 9781529961126
Length: 320 pages
Price: £16.99

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Liquid

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