Waiting on Wednesday: City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris

-
 Jill at Breaking the Spine hosts Waiting on Wednesday each week to encourage book bloggers to spotlight an eagerly anticipated upcoming release.
City of Veils: A Novel 
My pick this week is City of Veils, a follow-up from Zoë Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf . Here's how the publisher describes this novel:
In this riveting sequel to her critically acclaimed debut Finding Nouf, Zoë Ferraris weaves an intricate plot of mystery and suspense, exploring the complexities and contradictions of life in Jeddah, a place caught between its role as the holy gateway to Mecca and a cosmopolitan city in an increasingly liberal world. City of Veils follows Nayir, Katya, and Osama as they unravel the connections between the murder of Leila Nawar and the disappearance of Eric Walker, while coming to terms with their own views of the strictures and tenets of Islam.
Zoë Ferraris moved to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War to live with her then husband and his extended family of Saudi-Palestinian Bedouins, who had never met an American before. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of one previous novel, Finding Nouf. She lives in San Francisco.
 Finding Nouf has been on my radar for far too long, and I cannot wait to read it and City of Veils.

City of Veils will be published August 9, 2010 by Little, Brown and Company, but you can pre-order it now.

Comments

  1. tarynwandererMarch 24, 2010 at 9:36 AM

    I haven't heard of this author before, but she's certainly led an interesting life, and the book sounds fantastic. Nice choice!

    My WoW pick is here!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AlayneMarch 24, 2010 at 9:41 AM

    What an intriguing novel. Thanks for sharing! My WOW is at The Crowded Leaf.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LoriMarch 24, 2010 at 11:30 AM

    I hope that one you get your book, that you enjoy it. Here's mine.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMarch 24, 2010 at 2:38 PM

    I STILL have to read Finding Nouf...and I have a signed copy sitting on my shelf. I'm seriously lagging.

    ReplyDelete
  5. (Diane) Bibliophile By the SeaMarch 24, 2010 at 7:08 PM

    Thanks for mentioning this book, as I was unaware of it and I did enjoy Finding Nouf.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

book review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

-
Image
The backstory: A Dangerous Place  is the eleventh historical mystery featuring Maisie Dobbs. My reviews of the other eleven (plus Winspear's stand alone historical novel) are in my Book Review Database . The basics: Set four years after the last Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved , in A Dangerous Place , we meet up with Maisie in Gibraltar in 1927 during the Spanish Civil War. She gets off her England-bound ship in Gibraltar because she's not quite ready to return. Note: this review contains spoilers about what happened in those four years of Maisie's life between books, all of which are revealed in this novel's first thirty pages.  My thoughts: Sunday I wrote about the Maisie Mail I received. These postcards appear in the book itself, along with many others. After setting the stage in Gibraltar in the opening pages (Maisie stumbles upon a dead body), Winspear recounts the last four years of Maisie's life in the form of postcards, letters, an...
Read more

book review: Run by Ann Patchett

-
Image
The backstory: After loving State of Wonder  ( my review ), I set out to read all of Ann Patchett's books. The basics: Run  is the story of the Doyle family: Bernard, an Irish Catholic ex-mayor of Boston, his deceased wife Bernadette, their adult son Sullivan, and their two adopted college ages sons, Tip and Teddy, who are biological brothers. My thoughts: I'm beginning to think Ann Patchett is my soul sister. Her writing reaches me deeply, and I've adored everything she's written. It was a special treat to read Run , the novel of hers I knew the least about going in. Although I had the framework of two of her novels and one memoir, I didn't know what to expect. Run  isn't as universally loved as some of her other works, so I was particularly curious to see how it measured up. Admittedly, Run  started off slowly for me. It took two chapters to really get into the heart of the story, but once it happened, I was hooked. One of the things I love most about ...
Read more

book review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

-
Image
The backstory: Gilead  won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. The basics: As Rev. Ames nears the end of his life in the 1950's, he begins a letter to his young son because Ames realizes his son is too young to really know him. Gilead  is that letter. My thoughts: Gilead  is a novel I'm been meaning to read for years. It's a character-driven, Midwestern narrative by one of our best contemporary writers. It should be a novel I love, yet I struggled to finish it and admit I was wowed by neither the story nor the writing. Gilead  seemed almost stream-of-consciousness at first. I appreciated that Robinson jumped right in: this novel is a letter from father to son; the reader's ignorance of these two characters is not the focus. As the novel progressed, more details began to be filled in, and the reader begins to understand the characters, setting and purpose. I enjoyed the ...
Read more