Arvin Ahmadi

How It All Blew Up (Viking, 2020) is assembled from interrogation transcripts. Amir Azadi, eighteen and facing photographs that would out him to his conservative Muslim parents, buys a ticket to Rome and stays a month; the family is pulled aside for questioning at the airport on his return, and each of them gives a version of events. Girl Gone Viral, the year before, puts seventeen-year-old Opal Hopper into a virtual reality contest to reach the tech billionaire she believes knows what happened to her missing father. Arvin Ahmadi grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington DC, studied at Columbia and worked in technology before the books took over. His first novel, Down and Across (2018), follows an Iranian-American teenager who runs off to find a psychologist studying grit; Ahmadi has said he made that character Iranian only after first trying not to.