Join us with Laleh Khadivi and Sanam Mahloudji to discuss their latest novels: Female Life on Planet and The Persians.

Join us with Laleh Khadivi and Sanam Mahloudji to discuss their latest novels: Female Life on Planet - A novel about love, secrets and the unknown depths of the people we love. The Persians - A stunning debut novel following five women from three generations of a once eminent Iranian family as their lives are turned upside down.

Female Life on Planet Earth

Meet Heti. An Iranian-American woman with two teenage girls, working in an accountancy firm in Los Angeles. When Heti’s mother dies, her aunt informs her that, according to tradition, it’s her duty to organize a one-year ceremony for all her mother’s family and friends.

But then Heti’s life is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package containing photographs of her mother as a young woman in Iran, enveloped head to toe in a black veil, pointing a machine gun at a group of sobbing women.

Shocked by the revelation, and unable to confront the one person she really wants to talk to, Heti turns to the women around her for advice: hilarious aunts and cousins, aggressive soccer moms, business associates, dear friends, and total strangers.

Listening to their often surprising, uproarious stories, Heti discovers that everyone has a secret and that all women’s lives are complicated and contradictory – so why should it be any different for her mother?

Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran and is the author of three novels, The Age of Orphans, The Walking and A Good Country, known as the Kurdish Trilogy. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and NEA grant for the arts. She lives in California and is chair of theUniversity of San Francisco MFA writing program.

The Persians -

The Valiat family are in crisis. Elizabeth, the regal matriarch, remained in Tehran despite the revolution and only has Niaz, her Islamic law-breaking granddaughter for company. In America, Elizabeth’ s daughters, the flamboyantly high-flying Shirin and frustrated housewife Seema, are wondering if their new lives there are all they had hoped for. Lastly, there’s the second granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student trying to find deeper meaning by giving away her worldly belongings.When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail, gossip about the family spreads like wildfire. Soon, Shirin sets out to restore the family name to its former glory. But what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered to anyone? And, will reputation be enough to make them a family again?

Sanam Mahloudji is an American writer born in Tehran and based in London. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize for her fiction and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, the Idaho Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. The Persians, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, is her debut novel.

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