Girls of Riyadh: A Novel

Rajaa Alsanea

Hul 2007 · Penguin Random House Audio · Isinalaysay ni Kate Reading

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When Rajaa Alsanea boldly chose to open up the hidden world of Saudi women—their private lives and their conflicts with the traditions of their culture—she caused a sensation across the Arab world. Now in English, Alsanea’s tale of the personal struggles of four young upper-class women offers Westerners an unprecedented glimpse into a society often veiled from view. Living in restrictive Riyadh but traveling all over the globe, these modern Saudi women literally and figuratively shed traditional garb as they search for love, fulfillment, and their place somewhere in between Western society and their Islamic home.

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Rajaa Alsanea is the author of the novel Girls of Riyadh, which was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. She grew up in Saudi Arabia as one of six siblings in a family of doctors and dentists. Alsanea received her bachelor’s degree in endodontics from King Saud University in 2005. 

Translator, author, and scholar, Marilyn Booth has had an interest in Arabic since the age of 12, when she spent a year in Beirut, Lebanon. Since graduating from Harvard-Radcliffe College with a degree in Near Eastern studies, she has had a varied career as a scholar at institutions such as the University of Oxford, St. Antony's College, Brown University, University of Edinburgh, New York University Abu Dhabi, and Magdalen College. In addition to Booth's many credits as a translator for books such as the bestselling Girls of Riyadh, her authored works include Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History Through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt and Bayram al-Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies.

Kate Reading is the recipient of three AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has narrated everything from Patricia Cornwell to George Eliot. Her favorite BOT recordings include Like Water for Chocolate, Middlemarch, and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Times series, which she narrated with her husband, Michael Kramer.