May I Die for You

For readers of I’m a Fan and The Wedding People, Panahpour’s debut crackles with intelligence and dark humor, as criminal defense attorney Nargess searches for the truth about her father’s death

Nargess has always had a complicated relationship with her ultra-wealthy parents, and with her identity as an American and an immigrant. But the details of her family’s life in pre-revolutionary Tehran remained hazy until, after her father’s unexpected death pulls her back into her parents’ orbit just when her career and her independent life seem to be coming together. Do the strange emails she starts receiving from Tehran have something to do with it? Could her (incredibly complicated) mother be implicated? Nargess knows the law in and out, but how can she unravel the facts when it turns out her parents left Iran with more secrets than Louis Vuitton luggage?

This unputdownable family drama takes readers from the wealthiest London neighborhoods to glitzy Miami night clubs and back to Tehran, examining the insane things we do for family—and that family does to us. Nargess’s messy yet earnest internal battle between embracing her heritage and throwing off the weight of her family’s past subverts cliched mother-daughter narratives and coming-of-age plots, introducing a singularly biting new voice in fiction.

• “For the protagonist of May I Die for You, the death of her father is at once a rebirth and a painful unraveling. Familiar faces take on ugly new expressions; her own desires turn strange and dangerous. In this thrilling debut, Nilou Panahpour draws us into a dysfunctional family of Iranian dissidents who live everywhere and nowhere, privileged and dispossessed. The journey is wild, propulsive, and delicious.” 
  Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television