Liquid

In this brilliant debut novel, a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles 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. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 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.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her recent novel Liquid has been shortlisted for the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize. Her translation from Farsi of Mahsa Mohebali's In Case of Emergency was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, while her translation of Farzaneh Milani's biography of the midcentury poet Forugh Farrokhzad is forthcoming with Liveright fall 2026. Her work has appeared in Granta, New York Magazine, n+1, and elsewhere.