Girls of Riyadh
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| Author | Rajaa Alsanea |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Fig Tree/Penguin Books |
Publication date | 05 July 2007 |
| Publication place | saudi arab |
| Pages | 300 |
Girls of Riyadh, or Banat al-Riyadh, is a novel by Rajaa Alsanea. The book, written in the form of e-mails, recounts the love lives of four young Saudi girls, Lamees, Michelle (half Saudi, half American), Gamrah, and Sadeem. It describes the relationship between men and women in the conservative Saudi-Arabian Islamic culture.
Girls of Riyadh tells the story of four college-age friends in Saudi Arabia, girls looking for love but stymied by a system that allows them only limited freedoms and has very specific expectations and demands. There's little contact between men and women -- especially single teens and adults -- but modern technology has changed that a bit (leading to young men trying everything to get women to take down their cellphone numbers). The Internet is also a new medium that can't contain women and their thoughts like the old system could, and the anonymous narrator of the novel takes advantage of that: she presents her stories in the form of e-mails that she sends out weekly to any Saudi address she can find.
Originally released in Arabic in 2005, Girls of Riyadh was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia due to (experienced) controversial and inflammatory content. Black-market copies of the novel circulated and Girls of Riyadh has been a bestseller across much of the Middle East[citation needed]. As of January 2008, English copies of Girls of Riyadh are openly available at major bookstores in Saudi Arabia. The book, published by Penguin Books, is available in the English translation, but has some changes due to difficulties of re-creating the effect of using different dialects of Arabic.
The book is widely distributed, being sold in stores from U.S. to Europe.
External links
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