Courting Samira

Amal Awad

Nov 2021 · Pantera Press

About this ebook

It may be the twenty-first century, but who says courtship is obsolete?

Coming from a (somewhat-traditional) Muslim family, twenty-seven-year-old Samira Abdel-Aziz has seen her fair share of suitors. Her general rule: if he comes in wearing shoes with tassels, a leather jacket circa 1982, and/or has a moustache, the doorknock appeal will fail from the outset. A girl has to have some standards, right?

As an assistant at Bridal Bazaar magazine, Samira's sick of all things wedding-related. Then she unwittingly becomes wedding gofer for her cousin/nemesis Zahra and her life begins to resemble a soap opera.

When she meets Menem in a chance encounter at a team-building day, for the first time Samira knows what it's like to naturally be interested in someone. But with that comes a whole new set of problems. How do you get to know someone when the options seem to be to get married or end up a spinster? Why is her best friend Lara insisting that Menem isn't right for her? And why has her childhood friend Hakeem started behaving so strangely?

A light-hearted but honest peek into the life of a young, single Muslim woman who knows there's more to life than love at first suitor visit.

About the author

Amal Awad is a journalist, screenwriter, author and performer. She has contributed to ELLE, Frankie, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging, Daily Life, Sheilas, SBS Life and Junkee. She has also produced and presented for ABC Radio National and has held senior editorial roles at a number of trade publications. As a public speaker, Amal appears at schools, universities and writers' festivals around Australia. She presents workshops on storytelling and creativity, has been a regular panellist on ABC TV's The Drum and was a TEDx Macquarie speaker in 2019. As a screenwriter, Amal has worked on several film and television projects and is in development on more. She has also directed short films, a pursuit she continues alongside writing and performing. Amal is the author of Courting Samira, This Is How You Get Better and The Things We See in the Light as well as the non-fiction books The Incidental Muslim, Beyond Veiled Clichés: The Real Lives of Arab Women, Fridays with My Folks: Stories on Ageing, Illness and Life, and In My Past Life I Was Cleopatra. She has also contributed to the anthologies Growing Up Muslim in Australia: Coming of Age and Some Girls Do... (My Life as a Teenager).