The novel offers a nuanced portrayal of the female experience, highlighting both the quiet strength and vulnerability that define these women's lives. Khadivi’s storytelling is both intimate and powerful, prompting reflection on the universality of female resilience and the specific cultural realities that shape these stories.

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.

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.

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.

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

Khadivi’s novel is a brilliant, mosaic‑style investigation of womanhood across cultures, generations and private histories. Told through vivid, intimate vignettes, it traces the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters, sisters, cousins and friends, using Heti’s grief and the shocking revelation of her mother’s hidden past as the emotional anchor.

The story moves with wit and warmth even as it confronts painful truths, and the chorus of women Heti turns to create a layered portrait of the secret selves women carry and the stories they inherit. They are contradictory, funny, sorrowful, and deeply human a

The novel’s fractured structure can seem to drift or get distracted, but the looseness is deliberate. Each fragment becomes one of the many disparate facets of womanhood whether real, imagined, inherited, or suppressed and the way Khadivi gathers them in the final movement makes them meaningful and gives the bills it's richness. What first feels scattered resolves into a cohesive, resonant whole, mirroring the layered, sometimes contradictory selves contained within every woman.

A moving, original celebration of connection, memory and the many lives contained within a single woman.

If you want, I can also craft a NetGalley‑ready version or a more concise blurb.

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

What a gorgeous surprise this book was! The writing, the complexity of women’s lives touch, the subtle sense of humor, the insight of culture, all together brought to life a story I just wanted to read without a break.

Heti is someone’s daughter and now someone’s mother, who’s trying to cope with the loss of her dear mother. But not only the physical loss, also the perception smudged by some lies (according to the received pictures).
Once her perception of her mother gets bruised, Heti can’t stop questioning who was she after all? How can someone you thought you knew becomes a new version even after their death?
Through the entire journey of grief and uncertainty, Heti starts to understand the full complexity of being a woman and the layers of personalities that makes them so intricate.
In a world of so many human types and struggles, being a woman is stil, in my eyes, the deepest and empowering experience.

My triggers
* Is your identity stripped from you once you found out some missing puzzle pieces of your past?
* Does toughness come through inheritance?
* Can we agree that sometimes religion and culture get lost into each other’s territory?
* Just because you are genetically related to your family, that doesn’t mean your soul belongs to them too.
* I hide behind sense of humour majority of times. Depressed? Laugh a bit. Too tired to cry? Laugh a bit. Someone died? Oh god, this is gonna sound morbid, but I have to laugh a bit.
* Astrology believer here with huge desire to learn more about it.
* No one adapts faster to any new situation than a woman.
* Loss and grief differ from human to human.
* Women are always regenerating and reinventing themselves, while men can easily live life in a straight line.

I enjoyed this one a great deal.

What begins as a daughter’s attempt to understand her late mother gradually becomes something much broader: a novel about memory, immigration, friendship and the different versions of ourselves that we present to different people. The premise hooked me immediately, but what kept me reading was the way each conversation added another layer, not just to Ana, but to the women around her.

I particularly liked the structure. Each chapter introduces another voice, another perspective, and another reminder that no one—not even those closest to us—is ever fully knowable. It could easily have become repetitive, but I found each encounter brought something fresh, whether poignant, funny or quietly revealing.

Although the mystery of Ana’s past provides the framework, this is much more interested in character than in delivering dramatic revelations. If you go into it expecting a thriller, you may be disappointed. I found the emotional journey far more satisfying than the search for definitive answers.

It perhaps lost a little momentum in the final quarter, and there were moments when I felt some of the conversations made similar points. Even so, the warmth of the writing and the compassion shown towards its characters meant I was more than happy to stay with it.

A thoughtful and quietly affecting novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love, or whether we simply know the version of them they chose to show us.

Such a powerful story of what it means to be a woman in a man’s world. Heti is mourning the loss of her mother, and she is asked by the extended family to organise a one year memorial according to the traditions of their home land. It is a land where women are marginalised and denied the right of education and freedom from the constraints of fathers, husbands and sons. She is to discover that mothers and daughters don’t always know each other, as details of the earlier time come to light. In the lead up to the memorial Heti is made aware of other complicated relationships, even outside her culture women find their own solutions to life’s challenges. There is a great deal of humour and love in this book, which does not seek to enforce a particular message, but is really quite wonderful in its view of womanhood. I loved it.