Female Life on Planet Earth

by Laleh Khadivi

By the award-winning author of the acclaimed Kurdish trilogy, a novel about a daughter discovering her mother’s secret past as a violent militant in the Iranian Revolution When Heti’s mother, Ana, dies, she leaves behind a spotless affectionate parent, modern career woman, and life of the party. Heti moves in a daze until her grief is upended by the arrival of an unmarked package containing photographs of Ana as a young woman—robed, standing in front of a burning building, and pointing a gun at a group of sobbing women. Female Life on Planet Earth follows Heti as she raises teenage daughters, keeps up with client accounts, sits in LA traffic, and prepares to host the traditional anniversary memorial—all while quietly reeling with the violent secrets of the woman she thought she knew. Though the dead can’t answer her questions, the living never seem to shut up. Heti is buoyed as she listens to the women who populate her hilarious aunts and cousins, aggressive soccer moms, business associates, dear friends, and total strangers. Inside these surprising, uproarious stories of female life, Heti discovers the selves women hide away, selves defiantly in search of pleasure, autonomy, delight, and connection. Heti begins to understand the complex and contradictory possibilities that exist inside every woman—including her mother, including herself. As the one-year mark of Ana’s death arrives, Heti calls together the women who knew her and asks Who was my mother, truly? And who are we? Told with humor and emotional precision, Female Life on Planet Earth is a celebration of lineage, inheritance, and the boundlessness of women over time and space.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 22, 2026

About the author

Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. She received her MFA from Mills College and was a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. She has been awarded a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Literature Fellowship. She has also worked as a director, producer, and cinematographer of documentary films. Khadivi lives in Northern California.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book within 24 hours - once I began, Khadivi's exquisite prose, as incisive as it is sublime, carried me like a tide through to the very end of the story.

This novel is a masterful exploration of grief, mothers and daughters, and the beautiful complexity of women's lives and identities. Khadivi's portrayal of Heti, her mother, as well as every passing mother, daughter, wife, friend or sister described in the novel, even in passing was incredibly nuanced, intricate, and moving. Khadivi's writing is elegantly efficient, the novel clocking in at less than 250 pages, with every word measured and meaningful. I will be thinking about this story for a long time to come.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Oneworld Publications for the Advanced Reader Copy.

“This is what happens when you do not mourn the dead, they come back any way they can.”

A beautiful, intelligent and deeply moving meditation on grief, daughters, mothers and the hidden lives women carry beneath the roles they inherit.

A daughter spends a year mourning her mother, only to discover that grief is not the end of knowing someone. Sometimes it is where the real understanding begins.

The story follows Heti in the year after her mother’s death as she prepares for the traditional one-year remembrance ritual expected of the eldest daughter in an Iranian family. Alongside her grief, mysterious packages begin arriving at her home, revealing fragments of her mother’s life, desires, fears and inner world that Heti never knew. Throughout the year, Heti also finds herself in a series of conversations with people both intimate and unexpected - family members, strangers, old connections and chance encounters - each one revealing another layer of what it means to be a woman, a daughter and a mother.

This book felt like grief wrapped in poetry. It is quiet, philosophical, melancholic and full of those kinds of lines you have to stop and reread because they somehow explain an entire life. It is not plot-heavy in the traditional sense, but the emotional and intellectual weight of it carried the story.

What I loved most was the way it explored motherhood not as something saintly or simple, but as something layered, private, consuming and often invisible. There is such a powerful thread throughout the novel about how women disappear into the roles they are expected to play - mother, wife, daughter - and how much of themselves they bury in order to outwardly survive.

“That is a mother’s job… to hide the self, the fears and rages, to present a surface that is calm, that is steady, that is safe. They think of it as a kind of generosity but really it’s a disappearance.”

Honestly, that line alone could have carried an entire book.

The relationship between mothers and daughters is handled so beautifully here. The novel understands that daughters spend so much of their lives trying to fit into the shape their mothers made for them, while also quietly trying to break out of it. There is love, frustration, admiration, resentment, guilt, duty and tenderness all mixed together in a way that felt incredibly true.

The Iranian cultural backdrop added so much richness to the story. The one-year mourning ritual gave the book a beautiful structure - moving through one full turn of the seasons before grief loosens its grip. There is something so moving about the idea that mourning takes a whole year to settle into your bones. One summer, one autumn, one winter, one spring.

I also loved the immigrant observations woven throughout. They were some of the sharpest, most memorable parts of the book for me because they captured that very specific survival mentality - the constant “what if something happens?” mindset, the saving, the preparing, the understanding that stability can disappear at any moment. The author captures a whole inherited worldview - the fear, the vigilance, the knowledge that security is fragile. The book is full of those moments where it suddenly zooms out and says something huge about women, immigrants, daughters, grief or family in a way that feels both specific and universal.

The writing itself is lovely. It feels lyrical without becoming overwritten, philosophical without losing its emotional core. There are so many beautiful reflections on poetry, womanhood and transformation.

“Poetry comes from the space between dimensions, where you can linger outside of time, between things.”

This is one of those books where the atmosphere and the ideas matter just as much as the story itself. It is interested in what women inherit from each other - not just objects or traditions, but silence, fear, duty, resilience, rage, softness, sacrifice and survival. It asks whether we can ever truly know our mothers, or whether we only ever know the version of them they allowed us to see.

This is a novel to sit with, underline, think about and carry around long after you finish it.

[J P · Rating 3 out of 5]

An episodic novel about how well we can know people and whether we are more than we present to the world. The loose structure follows the mourning period of a year following Heti's (the main character's) mother's death.

The writing is lyrical, but distant and passive, and while there are loose threads between the various interactions reported in the novel, as a whole the structure makes the whole untethered from reality and the characters too often behave and speak solely to serve the novel rather than in ways that feel truly authentic.

It reads like a novel aiming at profundity but I'm afraid for me it falls a bit short without anything new or interesting to reflect on, and the writing isn't compelling enough to overlook the flaws.

[Brittany | BrittanyIsBooked · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC. All opinions are my own. The prose in this book is beautiful. I wasn’t certain that I was going to love the book, and chose it because I was interested in learning more about the mother and her role in the Iranian Revolution. What I received was a beautiful account of the love of women. The book spans the year after Heti’s mother’s death; the grieving period. Some moments are slower than others, but the book came with shocking bits of laughter sprinkled throughout. Honestly, it was a very appropriate and beautifully written account of grief and how life must go on.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wasn't written in the way I was anticipating, but I still didn't mind it being written as pieces of conversation throughout a year's time. I wasn't the biggest fan of the sexualised parts of the book, but I get why these subjects came up.
One line from the book sat with me the most, "..but then I realized that I married him because he's not an immigrant, because he doesn't wake up every day and think what if something happens, he just wakes up and waits for the world to give him what he wants."
Feminist lit fans will enjoy this book and those who are big fans of literary fiction at its essence.

[Aster Greenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was an interesting story, and an interesting way of formatting it, with the entire story essentially being conversations Heti has while she's waiting to mourn her mother properly. It's a series of small conversations that give us a larger idea into the life Heti's led as well as the kind of person her mother was. There's an additional conversation on womanhood in general that i found interesting as well. I really liked the ending. The explanation for who Heti's mom was was just very fascinating, and the description in the way Heti processes that is beautiful

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written as series of conversations through a year, which can come across as a bit glitchy, this is certainly a literary fiction novel. It's hard-going, in terms of content and storyline, but those tricky sections which sometimes convey violence are well-handled. There is a strong feminist point being made through the threads in the narrative, and that's done very well. My thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

[DianaAitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

So pleased I received a copy of this lovely book from NetGalley.
It was a thoughtful and emotional read that stayed with me after I finished it.
Heti learns about her mother’s past following her death.
Gradually parts of the past are revealed, by various conversations in the lead up to the 1 year anniversary of the mother’s death.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to the publishers and netgalley for a free copy in return for open and honest review.

Powerful book through the eyes of different woman pre and post iranian revoultion and how female try to free of male domination and background is the daughter mourning her mother and a year before celebrate her life but does she really know her mother before her birth

[Ms Noob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great little read. Enjoyed watching the story of her mothers past unfold. The writing never felt flat or bloated just smooth and kept me hooked.
I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to have read this beautiful book.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book and beautifully written. I think it will stay with me. I will definitely be looking for the author’s other works. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Lavelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful dissection of grief and the relationship between mother and daughter. I loved it

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant exploration of mothers and daughters and women’s lives in a tight 200 pages.