When I started reading Afsheen Farhadi's new novel, False Prophet (Melville House; 288 pages), a fairly banal personal memory immediately came to mind, aided by the novel's concept and presentation. In the spring of 2009, I was on the road for work. In a small Montana town with few dining options, I parked at a local sports bar and watched the University of San Diego play Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference men's basketball final. When Rob Jones, San Diego's standout freshman, stepped to the free-throw line, and the play-by-play announcer dropped a detail that piqued my interest. Jones was the grandson of cult leader Jim Jones, who orchestrated the Jonestown mass suicide in 1978.

Another ten years passed, and my wife started a program at the University of San Diego. We made a point of attending every USD men's and women's basketball game against St. Mary's. 'You know,' I told my wife the first three times we went, 'Jim Jones's grandson used to play for both of these schools.' The fourth time I tried, she asked me not to repeat it again.

It was an anecdote, and not a particularly fascinating one. But as I read False Prophet, I started to think about how, in a small way, I'd co-opted Jones's story and used it to make myself sound interesting. More importantly, Farhadi's novel raised several issues for me: What obligation did I have to make sure the facts were true? What responsibility do I have when invoking another person’s history, especially one marked by trauma? I kept returning to these questions as False Prophet unfolded, not only because the book explores who can adapt someone else's history for their own purposes, but also because it integrates Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple cult in a significant way.

The novel follows Jal Persad, a rising Guyanese-American actor who reaches a moment of stasis after his mother's death. While being pitched new projects by his manager, Jal offhandedly says he's writing something (he's not) about his mother's life in Guyana and her involvement with Jones's cult while pregnant with him. Jal's manager sets him up with a ghostwriting partner, Kate, who largely takes control of the project while Jal grieves and spends time with his dog. Excerpts show up online, generating considerable buzz. But when Jal's cousin visits town and sees him at a public reading, it becomes clear that Jal is stretching the truth of his own mother's history.

Jal's mother Rita's involvement with the Peoples Temple, as it's presented to the reader, precedes the cult's unfortunate ending. As such, the novel does not provide context for the strange and unsettled place Jonestown and its unpredictable leader occupy in history. Over 900 people committed suicide, many of them American citizens living in a remote settlement in Guyana led by Jones. The mass suicide came on the heels of settlement members murdering a U.S. Congressman who came to visit, as well as four other people. Now, it's become documentary fodder, and the tragedy's impact has grown into more of a careless punchline after giving rise to the colloquial term "drinking the Kool-Aid."

That helps initiate the novel's storyline. Jal's agent knows of the tragedy (or at least remembers the Kool-Aid), but not much else. The unknown provides Jal with enough plausible deniability to construct a fictional account of the past. If he simply mentions that his mother was from Guyana, no one questions her involvement with the cult. Unfortunately for Jal, a few people do know the truth: namely, his cousin, an uncle who lives in London, and a young Guyanese reporter who appears late in the story.

The novel's structure alternates between chapters of the present, in which Jal and Kate develop the memoir and respond to escalating media attention, and chapters of the past presented as the actual story recounting Rita's life in Guyana and her experiences with the People's Temple. As we discover in Rita's sections, she visits Jonestown only briefly and meets Jim Jones once. He doesn't make a particularly favorable impression on her: "He had appeared to her earlier as a drunk. Now it was clear he was addicted to more than just alcohol. It amazed her that Jones, body slumped back, was conscious enough to speak." Most of her interactions are with Americans raising money for the Peoples Temple in the capital of Georgetown. It's a key craft decision to frame Rita's memoir on the cult's fringes rather than immerse her in the full experience, because we assume too much embellishment would have raised suspicion.  

The structure also heightens the unreliability of everyone involved, which helps the novel maintain its forward momentum. Initially, we're not quite sure of everyone's motivations, nor are we certain that what we're reading is the memoir Jal and Kate write, or whether it's Rita's true story. That unreliability supports the novel's larger point about how stories of the past are constructed and altered, while also keeping the pace afloat as we try to answer the questions that arise in our minds: What's real and what's not? Will we ever get the full truth? And, importantly, how much of Rita's story is being manufactured by Kate in an effort to chase her own success? Throughout, the novel maintains distance between what's happening on the page and the characters' motivations, preserving a sense of uncertainty.

The practice of elaborating on or altering facts and presenting them as a memoir plenty of public history. Perhaps the most famous example is James Frey's 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, about the author's history of drug and alcohol abuse, which was later proven to be fabricated. Alice Sebold's best-selling memoir Lucky, about her rape and the trial that followed, was pulled from future distribution by its publisher after the man Sebold fingered for her attack was exonerated. More recently, Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir, The Salt Path, detailed how Winn and her husband, who had been diagnosed with a rare illness, lost their home and hiked the South West Coast Path in England. In 2025, The Observer and other sources questioned the legitimacy of Winn's story and accused her of faking key details. (Winn has pushed back against this characterization.) Unlike these real-life examples, other people question the legitimacy of Jal's story almost immediately, keeping the novel's moral stakes in focus. This contrast sharpens the novel's themes: it asks readers to weigh the boundaries between truth and storytelling, as well as the moral ambiguities involved.

The novel's highlight comes from how Jal responds to criticism. It's not a straightforward case of being caught embellishing the truth, learning a lesson, and correcting his mistakes. That narrative path would have felt simple and stale. Instead, it's a nuanced look at what privilege Jal has to change his mother's story, what harm he could do in the process, and whether he has any right to bask in the attention he gets from a memoir he clearly knows is false. As his uncle tells him when Jal visits London, "You might feel you're gaining something with this story, but you're losing something too, and, in a way, for all of us, all the Persads who will have to live alongside a lie."

It's fair to say that the novel doesn't go quite far enough in developing and exploring relationships. Jal is a quiet character, and we don’t get scenes of him actually telling Kate his story, so we don't know how much she's responsible for embellishing. Because these conversations happen off the page, the dynamic between Jal and Kate remains vague, leaving us to wonder if Kate has the purest of intentions; her actions when the two take a trip to London to discuss it with Jal's uncle also strike an odd tone. Without deeper exchanges between the characters, it feels harder to grasp the full impact of their choices; the moments that elicit the most tension are instead muted by a lack of friction. Similarly, while Jal's encounter with his uncle, the last living person most familiar with his mother's story, touches on the key point Farhadi seeks to establish, the tension between them is real but not entirely explored. It feels like both characters are withholding something from each other, keeping the emotional stakes of their confrontation from fully landing.

While a richer exploration of these dynamics would have added more emotional resonance to the story, I'm torn as to whether it would have heightened the drama, and at what cost. The novel's biggest question is how much of Rita's story Jal intended to fabricate from the beginning. That morphs into wondering how Jal might correct the inaccuracies and respond to criticism. If we knew more about Jal's contributions compared to Kate's and looked more closely at their interactions, particularly regarding the book's composition, it might undermine the satisfying yet ambiguous conclusion. For better or worse, Farhadi deliberately keeps much of Jal's motivations at arm's length. But credit is due for allowing readers to answer some of the novel's lingering moral questions for themselves.

False Prophet takes a fresh and interesting approach to fabricated histories in fiction, particularly through the ambiguity of a ghostwriter's motivations. It's a more straightforward concept than Hernan Diaz's Trust, which more sharply focuses on using memoir to paint a prettier picture of one's past rather than letting a lie grow out of control. And the past Jal alters isn't done in the grandiose fashion of Zadie Smith's The Fraud. Here, we see how an altered backstory can mix with the facts of an actual event people can easily find on the internet.

Most of the popular culture focus on the Jonestown massacres is about how it could have happened, and how Jim Jones became so popular (and, of course, the Kool-Aid). There's also a heartwarming wrinkle, as my wife can attest, of his grandson finding success on the basketball court. But peel back the top layer of Jonestown and its volatile leader, and the novel's theme shifts to how a message can spiral out of control and how much we own our pasts and our futures. In False Prophet, we also get a sense of how people can attach themselves to a message and co-opt it for their own purposes, thereby deifying a person and creating, if you will, a false prophet.