My own women’s fiction PAINTING KUWAIT VIOLET set in the Middle East is out. To celebrate the release, I’ve compiled the best books set in the region that have ever been written.
Have you read any of them? Some will make you cry and others will tug at your heartstrings. Books set in the Middle East tend to be raw and offer a glimpse of life, most can scarcely imagine. You’ll either love these books or hate them if you don’t understand the culture.
And that’s the thing with books set in the Middle East, there are few happy stories. It’s as if there are no happy people. Everyone’s life has been touched by war. Generation after generation. The land is awash in blood. And yet there’s been no time to heal. Even though I’m tempted to read some of these books, I don’t think I’m ready to subject myself to the pain I’ve known. After all, me and my family fled the first Gulf War in 90 and I can tell you, those memories best stay buried. So, even though these books are rich in prose and poetry, guard your heart lest it breaks over the fictional stories threaded with truths.
Palestine, 1948. A mother clutches her six-month-old son as Israeli soldiers march through the village of Ein Hod. In a split second, her son is snatched from her arms and the fate of the Abulheja family is changed forever. Forced into a refugee camp in Jenin and exiled from the ancient village that is their lifeblood, the family struggles to rebuild their world.
Mornings in Jenin is a devastating novel of love and loss, war and oppression, and heartbreak and hope, spanning five countries and four generations of one of the most intractable conflicts of our lifetime.
Zoë Ferraris’s electrifying debut of taut psychological suspense offers an unprecedented window into Saudi Arabia and the lives of men and women there. When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, along with a truck and her favorite camel, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a desert guide, to lead a search party.
Fast-paced and utterly transporting, Finding Nouf offers an intimate glimpse inside a closed society and a riveting literary mystery.
WINNER OF THE 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE.
Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.
Saudi Arabia – where marriages are arranged and there are no cinemas or parties to go to, where social life consists of trying to keep girls and boys apart rather than put them together.
But as Rajaa Alsanea reveals in this absorbing novel, that’s not the whole story: determination, mobile phones and the internet have made life easier for young Saudis, and the four girls in this novel are all finding romance even though mostly it goes badly wrong. Girls of Riyadh captures the trials and tribulations of a middle-class society quite unlike our own and blows the lid off all our preconceptions of Arab life.
Jessica Jiji’s Sweet Dates in Basra is a compelling, poignant, and unforgettable tale of friendship and family, set in Iraq during the second world war. A dramatic departure from Jiji’s previous novel, Diamonds Take Forever, Sweet Dates in Basra brilliantly captures the atmosphere of a volatile Middle East during the previous century and pays tribute to the lost traditions of a once-idyllic world.
A Girl Made of Dust is a sophisticated exploration of one family’s private battle to survive in the midst of civil war. In her peaceful town outside Beirut, Ruba is slowly awakening to the shifting contours within her household: hardly speaking and refusing to work, her father has inexplicably withdrawn from his family; her once-youthful mother looks so sad that Ruba imagines her heart must have withered like a fig in the heat; and Ruba’s older brother has begun to secretly meet with older boys who carry guns.
A Girl Made of Dust is a coming-of-age story sparked, but not consumed, by violence and loss. This strikingly assured debut captures both a country and a childhood plagued by a conflict that even at its darkest and most threatening, carries the promise of healing and retribution.
THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is a mesmerizing historical novel about a young Iranian woman whose destiny changes on the sudden death of her father. Forced to leave their village, the woman and her mother travel to the beautiful city of Isfahan, where they are taken in by an uncle, a wealthy carpet designer, and his unsympathetic wife. When an ill-considered action results in the heroine’s fall from grace, she is forced into an extraordinary secret marriage. Spirited and rebellious, she wants to be free to live a life her own choosing, if she can find a way.
On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs.Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget.
When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.
The Sand Fish by Maha Gargash offers readers a fascinating glimpse into another corner of the world. Set in the 1950s in what is now the United Arab Emirates, The Sand Fish tells the poignant and powerful story of a rebellious young woman trapped in a repressive society—as richly atmospheric a look at Middle Eastern life and culture as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.
Nadia’s family is forced to flee their home in Aleppo, Syria, when the Arab Spring sparks a civil war in this timely coming-of-age novel from award-winning author N.H. Senzai.
Silver and gold balloons. A birthday cake covered in pink roses. A new dress.
It is December 17, 2010: Nadia’s twelfth birthday and the beginning of the Arab Spring. Soon anti-government protests erupt across the Middle East and, one by one, countries are thrown into turmoil. As civil war flares in Syria and bombs fall across Nadia’s home city of Aleppo, her family decides to flee to safety. Inspired by current events, this novel sheds light on the complicated situation in Syria that has led to an international refugee crisis, and tells the story of one girl’s journey to safety.
Zahra’s mother uses her as a cover for her meetings with a lover; Zahra’s strict father mistreats her for being complicit in her mother’s affair. Fleeing from Beirut in search of solace, Zahra stays with her uncle in West Africa—and then uses marriage as another kind of escape.
Back in Beirut, love finally comes to her, but with terrible consequences. Banned in several Middle Eastern countries since its original publication, The Story of Zahra is an intoxicating, provocative story of a young woman’s coming of age in a city torn apart by war.
In the summer of 2011, just after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. In order to keep her father’s spirit as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story-the tale of Rawiya, a twelfth-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker.
But the Syria Nour’s parents knew is changing, and it isn’t long before the war reaches their quiet Homs neighborhood. When a stray shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety-along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took eight hundred years before in their quest to chart the world. The Map of Salt and Stars is the epic story of one girl telling herself the legend of another and learning that, if you listen to your own voice, some things can never be lost.
The Personal History of Rachel Dupree. He is orphaned at birth, born into displacement and chaos. He has only one thing to hold on to: a love beyond his reach that propels him forward. She is young and idealistic, and tries to break out of the mould to create her own destiny. Will they be able to overcome their bleak realities amid war and tragedy? Heartbreaking and moving, Bitter Almonds is about displacement and exile, family duty and honour, and the universal feelings of love and loss.
Saudi-born author Keija Parssinen’s stunning debut offers the intricate, emotionally resonant story of an American expatriate who discovers that her husband, a Saudi billionaire, has taken a second bride—an emotionally turbulent revelation that blinds them both to their teenaged son’s ominous first steps down the road of radicalization. Readers of The Septembers of Shiraz will be captivated by Parssinen’s story of love and betrayal, fundamentalism, family and country in the Middle East.
Staircase of a Thousand Steps lifts the veil from a mystical land, where jasmine and dung mix and the inconceivable is embraced as commonplace.
In a Middle Eastern village that traces its history back to Abraham, the men gather nightly beneath a tree named Moses’ Finger, and the women meet at a place where “the earth breathes.”
But the midwife Faridah possesses transcendent wisdom and a dangerous scorn for tradition. And the shepherd Harif, seer and village outsider, weaves stories in an effort to protect his fragile status. While Harif’s granddaughter, Jammana, struggles between the allure of the ancient world and the tensions of a modern age.
Through an ancestral gift, Jammana experiences the memories of those closest to her-Faridah, Harif, and her mother, Rafa. But as she unwittingly uncovers the village’s secrets, old grudges move like a slow burn across the fields and ignite.
Set in Transjordan just before the 1967 war with Israel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps braids a chorus of voices into a poetic, haunting tale of loyalty, longing, and accidental betrayal.
Drawing in the Dust
Scorned for agreeing to help an Arab couple excavate allegedly haunted grounds under their house, archaeologist Page Brookstone finds what may be the tomb of the prophet Jeremiah, as well as the remains of a woman, and intriguing scrolls documenting their relationship.
In this poignant, eye-opening and emotionally vivid novel, Mahbod Seraji lays bare the beauty and brutality of the centuries-old Persian culture, while reaffirming the human experiences we all share.
In a middle-class neighborhood of Iran’s sprawling capital city, 17-year-old Pasha Shahed spends the summer of 1973 on his rooftop with his best friend Ahmed, joking around one minute and asking burning questions about life the next. He also hides a secret love for his beautiful neighbor Zari, who has been betrothed since birth to another man. But the bliss of Pasha and Zari’s stolen time together is shattered when Pasha unwittingly acts as a beacon for the Shah’s secret police. The violent consequences awaken him to the reality of living under a powerful despot, and lead Zari to make a shocking choice…
A passionate and timely debut about mothers and daughters, roots and exile, from the streets of Iran to the suburbs of London
In what is certain to be one of the most talked-about fiction debuts of the year, Yasmin Crowther paints a magnificent portrait of betrayal and retribution set against a backdrop of Iran’s tumultuous history, dramatic landscapes, and cultural beauty. The story begins on a blustery day in London, when Maryam Mazar’s dark secrets and troubled past surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara. Burdened by guilt, Maryam leaves her comfortable English home for the remote village in Iran where she was raised and disowned by her father. When Sara decides to follow her she learns the price that her mother had to pay for her freedom and of the love she left behind.
When Fatima was growing up in the affluent neighborhood of Kalorama in Washington D.C., she never imagined that her father, an ambassador, would force her into an arranged marriage that would take her across the world.
Away from family and friends in a foreign country, she gradually accepts her fate… until an encounter with a handsome doctor ignites feelings and desires that jeopardize her life as she is torn between an unrelenting husband and a forbidden liaison. Her choices will uncover secrets that will unravel a chain of events that will change her life forever.
In 1996, a young graduate, Violet Baretto leaves Goa to work in oil-rich Kuwait as a maid for a wealthy Kuwaiti woman. To her horror, she finds herself accused of theft, her colleagues assaulted, thrown from moving cars or performing ‘favors.’
Sabah Dashti, the Kuwaiti matriarch can’t tell Violet the truth; nine of Sabah’s previous maids have absconded, five of them were found pregnant or that the police think she’s running a prostitution ring. Kuwait is still patriarchal and women are second-class citizens. Despite their differences, both Sabah and Violet are hungry for success. But a woman-hating, killer has set eyes on them and will not let them succeed at any cost.
Poignant, chilling and honest, Painting Kuwait Violet underlines the reality of women on either side of the country’s class divide.
Let me know if you have any happy/HEA women’s fiction titles you could recommend. I honestly felt quite sad as I compiled this list. Have a good happy women’s fiction set in the Middle East, leave a comment.
