Out now with Algonquin - March 11, 2025
& Doubleday in the UK
Forthcoming in Italian, Dutch & Croatian
“Smart, addictive debut”
— VANITY FAIR
“bitterly funny… [a] stylishly arch literary debut”
— BRITISH VOGUE
“A wry, mercurial book about the horrors of being ‘on the market,’ both in romance and in academe… Profound, unanswerable questions — about the academy’s relentless mistreatment of its workers, the mortifications of compulsory heterosexuality and the emotional inheritances we receive from our parents — glitter at the edges of certain passages like shards of glass.”
— THE NEW YORK TIMES Book Review
“The dawning of a literary force”
— PAUL BEATTY
“Rahmani is in many ways reinventing the Iranian American novel, subtly yet substantially. In books such as Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and Sanam Mahloudji’s The Persians—and even most of my own—Iran is a symbol of all that has been lost once one leaves the country behind. But in Rahmani’s novel, the country is an actual setting for flesh-and-blood characters rather than a silent specter. Rahmani’s universe is never quiet; everything is spoken, often exhaustively and exhaustingly, in writing so electrically alive that the reader feels fully immersed in her world.”
— Porochista Khakpour for THE ATLANTIC
“Like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty… a story that explores the margins of sexuality, gender, racial identity, and much more… Heady and intellectual yet sexy and deeply felt… this is fiction that brings theory into practice in a romantic comedy of sorts that will leave readers thinking about much more than Jane Austen’s truth universal.”
— LIBRARY JOURNAL
“A poetic and yearning contemplation of Iran, belonging, family, and love that is both as enlightening as it is genuinely rare”
— THE CUT Book Gossip
“Cynical humor pairs with personal turmoil to make for a head-spinning ride through dating apps, academia, and the contours of Iranian American identity.”
— FOREIGN POLICY
The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her—and her project—to Tehran.
The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just "marry rich."
But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.
Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time.
For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Elif Batuman, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss, and belonging like no other. Mariam Rahmani’s gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy.
“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
“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
“Brainy, swift, naughty, constantly surprising, and slyly political—a transgressive tour de force of cultural criticism hidden inside a careening, and deftly comic, logic proof of love.”
— HEIDI JULAVITS
“Liquid is an absolute lifeline—Mariam Rahmani's prose expands what's possible on the page, with a novel that's loving, cutting, mournful, and hilarious. Rahmani knows LA and Tehran. Rahmani knows sex, pleasure, and pain. Rahmani knows loss, and care, and the stickiness in-between. Liquid is a dream of a book—written with heart and feeling and longing and clarity, bracingly astute, elastic and precise—an absolute delight expanding the possibilities in American fiction.”
— BRYAN WASHINGTON
“Provocative, intelligent and bold, Liquid is a novel that lingers. Rahmani’s ability to access humor at the perfect moment, and her keen understanding of the power and perils of vulnerability, make her the best kind of observer—an honest one.”
— ANGELA FLOURNOY
“Liquid is sleek, gimlet-eyed, stylish and doubtless smarter than the average reader — myself. But it is ever prescient and often very witty about the fate of love among thirty-somethings — indeed, among us all — as we enter the brave new world ahead.”
— RICHARD FORD
“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 social acuity 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
“‘Finding a job, finding a husband.’ Both are proving elusive. Written with a cold eye and warm heart Liquid traverses a fascinating woman's circuitous route to self-discovery. An eminently memorable novel worthy of all the praise and raves it will undoubtedly receive. It literally took my breath away.”
— BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM