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Girls of Riyadh

A Novel

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About this listen

 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.©2007 Rajaa Alsanea; (P)2007 Penguin Audio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. and Books on Tape. All rights reserved. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Middle East Saudi Arabia

Critic reviews

“Alsanea's wisdom and insight into the female experience seem surreal. She captures the core, universal truths of the complications in finding and holding a life partner. Her characters provide wisdom to each other that are astounding in their accuracy, and Alsanea thus speaks for countless women everywhere.” —Bookreporter.com
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I’ve actually read the novel in Arabic a few years ago so when I saw this English version, I wanted to give it a try since I found the story very interesting and intriguing. I enjoyed it a lot.

Intriguing. I enjoyed it!!

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This is like an Austen tale for the Middle East. It is gossipy and full of trials and trivialities for the women and their paths into love. There is such a formality in the contracts of getting married and a code of honour to society life, but like most of Austen it becomes little more than background noise for me.

Arabian Austen?

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my many thanks to the author and her friends for sharing their stories and their thoughts, as well as the narrator for the beautiful performance. I wish I knew arabic to enjoy the original script with all the dialects, maybe later I will

loved it

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This is a story that never seems to get going or have a point. Igave up on it.

Boring

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