Liquid

Author Mariam Rahmani
Narrator Mariam Rahmani
Publisher Transworld
Publish Date 1 May 2025
Run Time 9 hours and 3 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Love and relationships.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

‘My career had gone nowhere. My love life was non-existent. And as for s*x – here I was, home alone on a Saturday night with a chick flick playing on my laptop because I didn’t own a TV. You can draw your own conclusions.’

Our protagonist always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. But a couple of years on from earning a fancy PhD, she’s still broke, single and stuck in a job going nowhere. One option remains: marry rich.

Her summer becomes a whirlwind of dating: martinis with a lazy heir, board games with a butch producer and a Venmo request from a ‘socialist’ trust-fund babe. However, when some unexpected and tragic news takes her – and her project – to Tehran she is forced to ask and answer some overdue questions about family, connection and, terrifyingly, her own purpose in life and in love.

A riveting spin on a classic romantic comedy, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss and belonging in a gorgeous high-wire voice that explodes off the page with wit, verve and originality.

'Sexy, sly, daring' Justin Torres, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts

'The smoothest, smartest book I’ve read in quite some time' Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

'Loving, cutting, mournful, and hilarious' Bryan Washington award-winning author of Family Meal and Memorial

© Mariam Rahmani 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Spikily funny . . . Her prose is varnished with sarky asides on dating, race and class in ways that bring to mind a modern day Jane Austen.

Daily Mail

Playful, sexy and oppressively sunny. Mariam Rahmani has written a very L.A. novel . . . She is sharp, clear-eyed and always so fashionable. Mariam brings all that style, wit and brilliance to Liquid, a novel [driven] by a narrative voice that is at turns sardonic, hilarious and yearning. The premise -- marry rich or die trying -- is handled so intelligently and schematically . . . The structural bifurcation of the novel is a bold choice, and all the more rewarding for its boldness . . . Liquid is a book troubling the fault lines.

Los Angeles Times

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, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout

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 sociological richness 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, author of the National Book Award Finalists The Rupture Tense and Eye Level

Loving, cutting, mournful, and hilarious . . . 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 award-winning author of Family Meal and Memorial

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, author of Directions to Myself and The Vanishers

Written with a sharp eye and warm heart, Liquid traverses a fascinating woman's circuitous route to self-discovery . . . It literally took my breath away.

Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food

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, National Book Award-winning author of Blackouts and We the Animals

Provocative, intelligent and bold, Liquid is a novel that lingers. Rahmani's ability to access humour 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, author of the National Book Award Finalist The Turner House

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