Girls of Riyadh
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| Girls of Riyadh | |
| Author | Rajaa Alsanea |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Fig Tree/Penguin Books |
| Publication date | 05 July 2007 |
Girls of Riyadh or Banat al-Riyadh, is a novel by Rajaa Alsanea. The book tells the love stories of four young Saudi girls, Lamees, Michelle (half Saudi, half American), Gamrah, and Sadeem in the form of emails.
Rajaa Alsanea grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the daughter of a family of doctors. She currently lives in Chicago where she is a dental graduate student. She is twenty-five years old and this is her first novel.
Originally released in Arabic in 2005, Girls of Riyadh was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia due to controversial and inflammatory content. Black-market copies of the novel circulated and the daring originality of Girls of Riyadh continues to create a firestorm all over the Arab world and has been a bestseller across much of the Middle East[citation needed]. Many critics have considered the novel as merely mediocre, and there is a rumor that the author played a role in fabricating the hype surrounding the novel. The novel lately lost much of its luster, and has not appeared in the best seller lists of Arabic novels of 2007, and has been overshadowed by other novels such as The Others and The Shadow Government(Novel), the later which became the #1 bestselling novel in Arabic in 2007.
As of January 2008, English copies of Girls of Riyadh are openly available at major bookstores in Saudi Arabia.
