BuzzFeed's 33 Most Exciting New Books Bustle's 28 Most Anticipated Non-fiction Books of 2018 Nylon's 50 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 Huffington Post's 60 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 Electric Literature's 46 Books to Read By Women of Colour in 2018 For as long as Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn't know why. A story of survival, pain and transformation, Sick examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life. It is a journey that took Porochista Khakpour from Tehran, the town of her birth, through the major cities of America, the country she came to call home, before she eventually found a diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease. Sick explores what it means to feel at home in one's body, and also one's country. And what it means not to.

With rolling storytelling cadences and wry wit that recall Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Porochista Khakpour, a young writer who emigrated to California from Tehran at age three, has delivered an extraordinary debut that marks her as a major and outrageously gifted new voice. Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a unique and powerful first novel, at once a comedy and a tragedy, a family history and a modern coming-of-age story with a distinctly timeless resonance. Growing up, Xerxes Adam is painfully aware that he is different--with an understanding of his Iranian heritage that vacillates from typical teenage embarrassment to something so tragic it can barely be spoken. His father, Darius, dwells obsessively on his sense of exile, and fantasizes about a nonexistent daughter he can relate to better than his living son; Xerxes's mother changes her name and tries to make friends; but neither of them offers their son anything he can actually use to make sense of the terrifying, violent last moments in a homeland he barely remembers. As he grows into manhood and moves to New York, his major goal in life is to completely separate from his parents, but when he meets a beautiful half-Iranian girl on the roof of his building after New York's own terrifying and violent catastrophe strikes, it seems Iran will not let Xerxes go. A wry and haunting first novel from a fresh Iranian-American writer, Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a sweeping, lyrical tale of suffering, redemption, and the role of memory and inheritance making peace with our worlds.