Liquid: A Love Story

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.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction and essays have recently appeared in Granta, Gulf Coast, and the Los Angeles Times’ Image Magazine, and her translation in n+1 and Columbia Journal. Her 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 and named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker. Her awards include an American Council for Learned Societies fellowship and a US Fulbright grant. She holds a PhD from UCLA and an MFA from Columbia, as well as degrees from Princeton and Oxford. She currently serves on the faculty of Bennington College.