By Dina Nayeri

On Sale: Jan 12, 2027
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN-13: 9781523536542

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For readers of All Fours and Glynnis MacNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, a woman leaves her high-powered NYC job and flees to Edinburgh hoping to live a happy and fully indulgent life before, as she sees it, her body goes to pot. But is there more to life than that?

Mina once had a life as a consultant that checked all the boxes of success: a cushy income, vacations to exotic destinations, such incredible prestige. She’s left all that behind to live in a small flat in Edinburgh, making just enough on freelance work to get by, determined to truly live a happy life; all it takes, she’s decided, is a combination of antidepressants, jiu jitsu lessons, and indulgent sex. But when she joins a local sauna and meets an eccentric older woman whose life is falling apart, while also dealing with an aging and terminal client, the purpose of Mina’s life suddenly, and very brightly, comes into focus.

Nayeri explores the ache for something more than the hamster wheel, the disappointments of love, the ludicrousness of middle-age fulfillment, and the monumental surprises that a life can bring with tenderness and wit and intelligence. For fans of Miranda July, Caroline O’Donogue, and Catherine Newman, Nayeri puts one singular woman at the center as she attempts to seize all she can out of life not just for herself, but for everyone around her.

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Dina Nayeri’s two previous novels have been published in over twenty countries and fourteen languages. Her nonfiction book Who Gets Believed? (2023) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and her nonfiction book The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Granta, and several literary journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she held the prestigious two-year Truman Capote Fellowship), Harvard Business School, and Princeton, she’s the recipient of an NEA literature grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, was a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the American Library in Paris, and was a finalist for the Rome Prize. Originally from Isfahan, Iran, she currently lives in Edinburgh, where she teaches at the University of St. Andrews.

Dina Nayeri

About the Author

Dina Nayeri’s two previous novels have been published in over twenty countries and fourteen languages. Her nonfiction book Who Gets Believed? (2023) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and her nonfiction book The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Granta, and several literary journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she held the prestigious two-year Truman Capote Fellowship), Harvard Business School, and Princeton, she’s the recipient of an NEA literature grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, was a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the American Library in Paris, and was a finalist for the Rome Prize. Originally from Isfahan, Iran, she currently lives in Edinburgh, where she teaches at the University of St. Andrews.

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