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BOOK: The Ruins of Us

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“
After years of reading articles and books written about women in Saudi Arabia, it was refreshing for me to hear some of them tell their own stories.
”

3.
Arab Women Writers: An Anthology of Short Stories
, ed. Dalya Cohen-Mor

In this anthology, Cohen-Mor includes several stories by Saudi women writers Umayma al-Khamis, Sharifa al-Shamlan, and Khayriya al-Saqqaf. Some of the other contributors are famous in the Arab world and abroad—Hanan al-Shaykh, Alifa Rifaat—but I had never heard of the Saudi contributors and enjoyed their odd, well-imagined stories. After years of reading articles and books written about women in Saudi Arabia, it was refreshing for me to hear some of them tell their own stories, in their own creative, insightful, and powerful voices.

4.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
, Hilary Mantel

This book, recommended to me by Kelly Smith, the librarian at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, joins ranks with other works of what I’ll call “expat gothic”: horror stories that unfold in strange lands, where part of the horror is the alien qualities of the land itself. Think Alex Garland’s
The Beach
, Peter Carey’s
My Life as a Fake
, or Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky
. Mantel tells the story of Frances, a Brit venturing to Saudi Arabia to join her husband, who works there. Through Frances’s black humor and paranoia, Mantel shatters romanticized portraits of expatriatism in Arabia—Lawrence of Arabia, Frances is not, and her story makes for an unsettling read as Mantel explodes the myth of easy multicultural understanding.

5.
Finding Nouf
, Zoë Ferraris

Ferraris married into a Palestinian-Saudi family and lived with her husband in Jeddah for a year.
Finding Nouf
is a riveting mystery that follows a wealthy Jeddah family after their daughter, Nouf, goes missing. In Ferraris’s book, you have at once a compelling detective story as well as a transporting work of literary fiction.

6.
Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia
, Mai Yamani

When I brought up Yamani’s book with an older, conservative Saudi friend, he said, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. That book is silly.” Rather, I think “that book” hit a nerve with the older generation in Saudi Arabia, perhaps because it exposes the changing beliefs of a people in flux. Using an anecdotal style bolstered by extensive research, Yamani, the daughter of famous and controversial former oil minister Zaki Yamani, gives us a fascinating glimpse into the lives of young people in the Kingdom.

“
[
Changed Identities
] hit a nerve with the older generation in Saudi Arabia.
”

Arab/Middle Eastern Literature

1.
Season of Migration to the North
, Tayeb Salih

First published in Arabic in 1966, this book by Sudanese author Salih was ahead of its time, considering that Edward Said’s seminal work,
Orientalism
, was still more than a decade away. It turns upside down traditional notions of the Orient by tracking the journey of the keenly intelligent unnamed narrator, who ventures to London and proceeds on a violent mission of reverse-colonialization by bedding naïve British women entranced by his otherness. He exploits their fantasies to devastating effect. Poetic and brutal, this book takes you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

“
[MacFarquhar] turns a critical but compassionate eye on recent events there and helps his Western audience better understand the intricate social and political dynamics underlying them.
”

2.
The Septembers of Shiraz
, Dalia Sofer

I wept at this novel’s conclusion. Though the story ends hopefully, Sofer examines the injustices of revolutionary Iran with such mastery and humanity that you can only weep for the terrible things we do to one another in the name of religion, the state, and beliefs. I found it so thoroughly engrossing that I continue to dream about the family at the heart of the story.

3.
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday
, Neil MacFarquhar

MacFarquhar, the longtime
New York Times
bureau chief in Egypt and a former Libyan oil brat, has a unique perspective on a complicated region. An Arabic speaker who has travelled extensively in all parts of the Middle East, he turns a critical but compassionate eye on recent events there and helps his Western audience better understand the intricate social and political dynamics underlying them. Sometimes funny, often heart-wrenching, always honest, this book is a master class on the modern Middle East.

4.
In the Country of Men
, Hisham Matar

With this striking debut, Libyan Matar gives us the story of the el-Dawani family told through the eyes of nine-year-old son Suleiman. In the terrifying aftermath of the 1969 revolution that brought Muammar Qaddafi to power, the family struggles to find its way. The secret police are menacing and omnipresent, and the father and mother clash on how to best exist in their brutal new reality. Suleiman reveals much to readers through his guileless yet keenly observant narration, through which Matar examines the day-to-day impact of despotism on a people, as well as the heartbreak of losing a homeland to vile forces.

5.
On Entering the Sea
, Nizar Qabbani

Qabbani, Syria’s unofficial poet laureate, writes such sensuous, large-hearted love poems, you’ll need a cold shower after reading this book. But more than writing love poetry, he also rallied in a famously conservative region on behalf of sexual freedom, particularly that of women, whom he viewed as the unfortunate victims of stifling and old-fashioned tribal mores.

D
on’t miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com.

Acknowledgments

I AM INFINITELY
grateful to my editors: Allison Lorentzen, who chose this book as her own and guided me to its best end; Sally Kim, the consummate professional whose wisdom and generosity continue to amaze me; and Maya Ziv, whose passion, energy, and insight have been invaluable. Thank you, also, to Priscilla Gilman, who sold the novel in North America. Thank you to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a place that changed the course of my life, and all of the talented teachers there who helped me refine the book and better my craft: Anthony Swofford, Elizabeth McCracken, Charles D’Ambrosio, Scott Spencer, Lan Samantha Chang. Thank you to the Workshop’s dedicated staff: Connie Brothers, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, Kelly Smith. Many thanks to the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the late James Michener, and the Copernicus Society of America for generously funding this project. I would be lost without my critical readers: Richard Rodriguez, Julia Fierro, Jennifer duBois, Victoria Kelly, Adam Krause, Shannon MacCleery, Carolyn Nash, and Rebecca Gradinger. I started writing this book in large part due to the guidance and encouragement I received at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and for both of those things, which came at such a crucial period, I’m ever grateful. Thank you to the Sloan family, the Settles family, Janice and Malcolm Robertson, and John Parssinen and Laura Bernstein, for your support and kindness, and for being the storybook family I thought a girl could only dream of having. Thanks to the ARAMCO Brats, for the memories. Thank you to my readers and friends in Saudi Arabia, who cheered me on and helped me to get it right. Finally, thank you to my beloved husband, Michael Robertson, who is my most dedicated reader and gentlest critic, and to my parents, Jon and Cathie Parssinen, who have delighted all of us with the enduring strength of their love. Without you, I wouldn’t have had the courage.

Advance Praise for Keija Parssinen’s
The Ruins of Us

“
The Ruins of Us
tells a gripping story about Saudi Arabian princes and bureaucrats, wives and extra wives, sons and daughters, fanatics and exiles, whose appetites and beliefs have been, until now, unavailable to readers of contemporary American fiction. Keija Parssinen uses her firsthand knowledge of the crossroads where U.S. and Saudi Arabian interests intersect and sometimes collide, and she directs the human and historical traffic with a maestro’s sense of pace and a true storyteller’s sense of consequence.”

—Scott Spencer, author of
Man in the Woods

“A big, brave novel, Keija Parssinen’s
The Ruins of Us
takes us behind the compound walls of Saudi Arabia and into the secret passions that threaten to tear one family apart. Step into Parssinen’s sensual prose and be transported.”

—Anna Solomon, author of
The Little Bride

“In
The Ruins of Us
, Parssinen carries the reader from Texas into the Saudi Kingdom in the grip of a story that is both entertaining and wise. Through an expertly drawn cast of characters and a suspenseful and timely series of events, it poses the universal questions: how much do we really know about the ones we love, and how far will that love carry us when the earth below our feet starts to shift?
The Ruins of Us
marks the debut of an enormously talented writer who is unafraid to lead us on the greatest adventure of all—into the wilds of the human heart.”

—Lise Saffran, author of
Juno’s Daughters

Credits

Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photographs © Ricardo Demurez/Trevillion Images;
Joachim Ladefoged/Gallery Stock

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

From
On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani
, published by Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright © Nizar Qabbani, 1980, 1986, 1995; English translation copyright © Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 1996. Reprinted by permission.

THE RUINS OF US.
Copyright ©
2012
by Keija Parssinen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parssinen, Keija.

The ruins of us : a novel / by Keija Parssinen.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-206448-6 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-06-206449-3 (e-book)

1. Americans—Saudi Arabia—Fiction. 2. Saudi Arabia—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.A7845R85 2012

813'.6—dc22

2011028519

12 13 14 15 16
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780062064493