Female Life on Planet Earth: A Novel

WINNER OF THE 2026 CALIBA GOLDEN POPPY AWARD

“A novel about love, secrets, and the unknown depths of the people we love, Female Life on Planet Earth is intoxicating. Khadivi writes with bristling intelligence and real beauty.”

—Katie Kitamura, national bestselling author of Audition

The weird thing is, I’m more interested in my mother now she’s dead.

From an award-winning author comes a stunning, darkly funny novel about a daughter discovering her mother’s secret past.

When Heti’s mother, Ana, dies, she leaves behind a spotless legacy: 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 world: 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 them: 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.