Liquid: A Love Story

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE In this brilliant debut, a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles 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