Laleh Khadivi and the Question of the Mother

Female Life on Planet Earth is Laleh Khadivi's new novel, published in September by Ecco in the US and Oneworld in the UK, and one of the five fiction finalists for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's 2026 Golden Poppy Book Awards. It is the story of a woman who, after her mother's death, is confronted with images of her mother's unknown past and, searching for answers, listens to the stories of other women.

Khadivi was born in Esfahan in 1977 to a Kurdish family, which left Iran after the revolution and eventually settled in North America. A documentary filmmaker before she turned to fiction, she won a Whiting Award in 2008 and wrote the Kurdish Trilogy: The Age of Orphans, The Walking and A Good Country. She lives in Oakland and teaches fiction at the University of San Francisco.

According to the UK publisher's description, Heti is struggling with grief after her mother's death when an unmarked package arrives. Inside are photographs of her mother as a young woman in Iran, veiled in black and holding a weapon. Unable to ask her mother, Heti listens to the sometimes humorous, often contradictory accounts of the women in her life, and when she must organise the memorial marking the first anniversary of her mother's death, she gathers the women who knew her mother and asks who her mother was, and who they are. Kirkus Reviews adds that Heti lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughters, and that her conversations take her from a soccer mom to a cousin at a secret comedy club, an exiled poet and a caterer. What the photographs show is part of the novel's fiction, not a historical claim.

Carole V. Bell, in a starred BookPage review, calls the novel a rare blend of the personal and the political. The year of ritual mourning set for Heti by an older woman in the family gives the book its structure, she writes, and Heti's wish to hold the memorial her own way, with stories, music and Mexican food, runs into the family's strict rules about women's roles and conduct. The photographs apparently revealing her mother's involvement in revolutionary violence turn grief into a search, and Bell praises how the family story is woven together with motherhood, immigration and gender politics during and after the revolution. "Khadivi does it gorgeously," she writes, and she counts the novel's vivid and sometimes shocking prose among its strengths.

Kirkus Reviews, also with a star, calls it "a beautiful, poetic work on the elemental bond between mothers and daughters." The book's question, Kirkus writes, is how a daughter can know a mother who was also a daughter, a lover and perhaps a revolutionary, and Heti's search turns less on who Ana was than on what being a woman can mean. It finds the succession of conversations "at turns deeply moving, strange, funny."

Djamel White in The Irish Times is more reserved, as the headline of his review makes plain: "Too many perspectives, not enough of an emotional thread." He praises the distinct voices, richly rendered settings and dreamlike prose, but argues that the repeated pattern of meeting, monologue and revelation across the chapters lays the story's machinery too bare. "The novel is a chorus of perspectives, but Heti's is kept at arm's length," he writes; "for much of the novel her role is that of receptacle," which lessens the novel's emotional impact. Still, he finds the ending, the anniversary ceremony where different truths about the mother sit side by side, is beautifully brought together.

The critics' main disagreement is over this many-voiced structure. What for BookPage and Kirkus opens a way to know the varied experiences of women, for White comes at the cost of Heti's own presence. The novel asks how to know a mother who can no longer answer her daughter's questions, and Heti's way of seeking answers has itself become the point on which the critics differ.

Sources: Oneworld; Kirkus Reviews (July 6, 2026); Carole V. Bell, BookPage (Sept. 22, 2026); Djamel White, The Irish Times (Oct. 3, 2026); CALIBA; Shelf Awareness (Aug. 25, 2026); Whiting Foundation; University of San Francisco; Bloomsbury.