A Mother's Hidden Past Sits at the Heart of Laleh Khadivi's New Novel
Heti's mother has just died, and the photographs that follow show a woman her daughter never knew. In them, a younger version of her mother stands veiled in black with a machine gun slung over her shoulder. That image sets up the central question of Laleh Khadivi's novel Female Life on Planet Earth, which The Guardian's review, published on 22 October 2026, describes. The novel asks whether Heti's mother was an enforcer of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Heti is an Iranian-American woman living in Los Angeles. She works for an accountancy firm and is the mother of two daughters, Ava and Zora. The chapters are named for planets or for terms from physics, the review notes, a structure that matches the book's title and its interest in distance and orbit.
The book's route to readers began in February. Oneworld, a London-based independent publisher, announced on 17 February 2026 that it had acquired the novel. Independent publishers are houses not owned by one of the large corporate groups, and an acquisition means the publisher bought the rights to publish the book. Oneworld placed it among its "superlead" titles for the autumn, meaning one of the top-priority books on its season list. The novel was set for September 2026, and Ecco, a US imprint of HarperCollins, published it at the same time, which means the book reached shelves in two English-speaking markets in the same window. Its release date was 22 September 2026.
Trade reviewers have already weighed in. Booklist and Kirkus Reviews both gave the novel a starred review, the top mark those publications award, which they flag with a star. Kirkus described the book as "a beautiful, poetic work on the elemental bond between mothers and daughters, or the earth and her moon." The author's own website also carries praise from Service 95 and from Samia Silba, a contributor to the Mizna literary journal, who wrote about the book's meditative style.
The audiobook is narrated by Mozhan Navabi, so listeners can hear the story read aloud. The novel has also won the 2026 CALIBA Golden Poppy Award, a book prize, according to the publisher HarperCollins. Khadivi is currently touring to promote the novel, and her event schedule is listed on her website.
For readers, the story is a useful reminder of how a single novel moves. One house buys it, a second house publishes it alongside, reviewers respond, and the book then travels to bookshops, libraries and listening devices. Each step has its own paperwork, deadlines and price, and most of it happens out of sight. At the end of that chain, the book is simply a novel on a shelf, waiting for someone to pick it up.
