Deeba Zargarpur

Deeba Zargarpur is an Afghan-Uzbek American writer and editor whose fiction draws on family storytelling, diaspora memory, and the uncanny. House of Yesterday is her debut novel, first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux's young-readers imprint in 2022 and later issued by Square Fish. Sixteen-year-old Sara enters a house her family is renovating while her parents separate and her grandmother's memory declines. Apparitions and objects within the building connect Sara to earlier generations, turning the renovation into a confrontation with inherited stories and concealed grief. Zargarpur combines contemporary family fiction for teens with magical realism and a ghost-story atmosphere. Her cultural background is integral to the novel's Afghan-Uzbek household, but the book keeps its focus on one teenager learning how memory can preserve, distort, and release the past. House of Yesterday established Zargarpur as a novelist before her later middle grade Farrah Noorzad fantasy series expanded her interest in family lore and supernatural adventure.