Excerpt from In the Time of Our History by Susanne Pari, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The "others" were the twelve or fifteen (he could never remember exactly) boy children of his various half siblings and relatives who had fled the Islamic Revolution in 1979 with little more than the clothing in their Louis Vuitton luggage and the jewels hidden in the heels of their wives' shoes. Suddenly, the America he'd thought of as his alone, where he played gracious host to visiting kin, transformed into a melting pot for his extended family. Some of them, thank God, had moved to Los Angeles, where they marinated in a false revival of the bourgeois decades before the fall of the Shah. But the others had, to their credit, obsessed over the education of their children, sent them to Ivy League schools, and proffered them up to Yusef. He took them, of course. He'd shown his family the benevolence that their common patriarch had never shown him.

Pressing the elevator button, he chuckled slightly. Who would have imagined that he—son of a minor wife, orphan of a madwoman, ignored burden-child—would end up being the family patriarch? As the metal door slid open to admit him, Yusef smiled. Just for a moment.

As soon as Vivian heard the familiar click of Mr. J's heels in the hallway outside the elevator, she beelined it to the galley kitchen to pour his glass of tea. By the time he made it past the marble reception area, with its faux-painted wall of a Persian rose garden, and wove his way through the maze of office cubicles (acknowledging no one), she was stepping carefully, silver tray in hand, past the gargantuan blueprint copier, conference room, restrooms, and her own office, where she quickly grabbed her steno pad and skittered out to fall in behind her boss as he entered his corner office.

The immense space was suggestive of an outmoded hotel suite; lots of chrome and tweedy orange fabrics, a sitting area with a long velour sofa and wet bar, a glass desk as large as a twin-size mattress. His employees called it the Retro Room.

He placed his briefcase on the desk, clicked it open, removed a pile of papers, and turned to unlock one of the oak cabinets in a bank behind his black leather executive swivel chair. Vivian laid his tea to the left of the blotter and took a seat on the other side of the desk, her pen poised over the steno pad.

"Where is Nezam?" he asked, his back still to her.

"At the project upstate," she said. "Something about a failed electrical inspection in the kitchens."

"And Kareem?"

"In Westchester at the Tarrytown building."

"What is he doing there? Ali One and Ali Two are responsible for that."

"He didn't say, Mr. J."

"Did he leave me a copy of the punch list on the Bergen duplex?"

"Not that I'm aware of, but I can ask Jane."

He turned. "Jane? Who's Jane?"

She paused slightly. She'd introduced them several times, but he never remembered the flat-chested ones. "A new secretary."

He reached for the tray, popped a lump of sugar in his mouth, and slurped at his tea. Vivian could never get used to the sound; in her house, food noises were bad manners. Over the years, she'd learned to accept some of Mr. J's incongruities, his "immigrant ways"—an afternoon nap on his sofa, slimy discarded sunflower seed shells in his ashtray, the waft of enough cologne to hide the odor of a postgame football team, and the fact that he never used his wife's name. After all, no matter how long a person lived in the United States, there were bound to be certain things they were incapable of assimilating. Her Scottish mother had never been able to look at a banana as anything less than a prize. And her neighbor from Bombay, a computer engineer, had been blowing his snot into the flower beds for fifteen years. It took a generation for people to become true Americans. Mr. J's kids were a perfect example. Correction: Mr. J's kid. Vivian cringed as if she'd made the mistake aloud. Why couldn't she go through a day without thinking about Anahita? He never mentioned it, but she was sure he grieved. What parent wouldn't? Sheri in the billing department, who'd been with the company for ten years, thought Mr. J was made out of concrete. Not one tear at the funeral, she often reminded Vivian. He even smiled and thanked the rich suits for coming. Sheri could say what she wanted; Vivian understood stoicism. Besides, this was the man who had paid for her husband's kidney transplant.

Excerpted from In the Time of Our History by Susanne Pari. Copyright © 2023 by Susanne Pari. Excerpted by permission of Kensington Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.