Liquid: A Love Story

DEBUT Like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Rahmani’s novel adapts and employs esoteric academic theoretical concepts in a story that explores the margins of sexuality, gender, racial identity, and much more. It follows an Iranian and Indian American scholar’s decision to marry rich (with a quipping reference to that oft-repeated opening line of Pride and Prejudice) by setting an assignment for herself to go on 100 dates by August 17. The story that unfolds has lines pulled from Edward Said and other literary and cultural theorists, which the narrator—through words and actions—tears apart, only to reintegrate into her own narrative of belonging and becoming. Rahmani’s novel is a direct and well-crafted satire of academia, but it touches on themes of power and hierarchy that can also be translated into other professions, making it a perfect read for people looking for (and at) romance with a complex sense of intersectionality and a recognition of what the narrator’s mother (also an academic) describes as the semiotics of who we are.