Zoë Ferraris

Zoë Ferraris moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians. In 2006, she completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. Her debut novel, Finding Nouf (published as Night of the Mi'raj in the UK) won the First Prize for mystery fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and is now being published in fifteen countries.

From a Q & A at her website:

First of all, I think people would like to know your connection to Saudi Arabia, so they don’t think you’re making this all up.

Well, actually, I made it up. But there’s also a lot of real Saudi Arabia in the book.

When I was nineteen, I got married to a Saudi-Palestinian Bedouin. We met in San Francisco, and I fell completely in love with him. He was hilarious and brilliant and over-the-top zany. He had come to America to study English. He told his parents that once he was fluent, he would go back to Jeddah. So he never became fluent. Learning English – actually, he called it “Languish” – was just going to have to take forever.

We got married and had a daughter. The day she was born, he decided that we had to visit his family in Jeddah. Just a short visit, you know, to show off his new wife and kid. We wound up staying for almost a year. It turns out that you can’t just visit for a week or two. You have to stay until his mother stops having heart episodes every time you go to the airport.

So you didn’t get along with your mother-in-law?

Not after... [read on]

Read an excerpt from Finding Nouf, and learn more about the book and author at Zoë Ferraris' website.

The Page 69 Test: Finding Nouf.

--Marshal Zeringue