Female Life on Planet Earth

'Intoxicating' KATIE KITAMURA 'Powerful' R. O. KWON 'A spellbinding fever dream' JONATHAN ESCOFFREY After a lifetime together, Heti thought she knew her mother inside out. She's about to discover how wrong she was. Heti moves in a daze of grief after her mother dies, until her life is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package containing photographs of her mother as a young woman in Iran, enveloped head to toe in a black veil, pointing a machine gun at a group of sobbing young women. Unable to confront the one person she most wants answers from, she turns to the women around her, listening to their surprising, funny and often contradictory stories. Through them, she realises that every woman contains hidden lives and private truths. So when it falls to her to organise a memorial marking the first anniversary of her mother's death, Heti gathers the women who knew her best and asks them: Who was my mother? And who are we? Original, sparkling with wit and layered with tenderness, Female Life on Planet Earth is a celebration of womanhood, perfect for fans of Good Girl by Aria Aber and The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji.

Laleh Khadivi is the author of three novels, The Age of Orphans, The Walking and A Good Country, otherwise known as the Kurdish Trilogy. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, NEA grant for the arts and the Stanford Stein fellowship. She lives in Oakland, California and is chair of the University of San Francisco MFA program in writing.