Liquid: A Love Story
Mariam Rahmani
Genre: Literary Fiction
Length: 320 Pages (Hardcover)
Audiobook: 9 Hours, 5 Minutes
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Get More Info: Goodreads | Storygraph
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Publisher’s Description
The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, Liquid by Mariam Rahmani, 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 by Mariam Rahmani 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. In Liquid by Mariam Rahmani, gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy.
Liquid by Mariam Rahmani is published by Algonquin Books (Hachette Book Group).
About Mariam Rahmani
Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her debut novel, Liquid by Mariam Rahmani comes out with Algonquin and Doubleday in March 2025. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications like Granta, New York Magazine, People, and the Los Angeles Times’ Image Magazine, and her translation in n+1, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Liquid is currently being translated into Italian, Dutch, and Croatian.
Rahmani’s first book-length translation, of the contemporary Iranian cult hit novel In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, was well reviewed in The New Yorker and The New York Times, named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. Her work as a translator has been distinguished with a PEN/Heim grant and two shortlists, for ALTA’s National Translation Award and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize by the MLA. She is now working on her next translation, of Farzaneh Milani’s The Literary Biography of Forugh Farrokhzad (Liveright 2026), offering a window into the life and work of this beloved midcentury poet and rebel.
Rahmani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. Among her awards are a US Fulbright fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship with the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Henfield Prize, the Columbia MFA’s highest honor in fiction.
She currently serves on the faculty of Bennington College and on the advisory and editorial boards of Acacia, a new magazine for the Muslim left (Mariam Rahmani, 2025).
Read more about Mariam Rahmani here.
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