As the second-largest producer of oil, Saudi Arabia often sets the price. Five books and a film help make sense of the rapidly changing country
Henry Holt; 400 pages; $27. Wildfire; £20.
“What happened to us?” asks Kim Ghattas, a Dutch-Lebanese journalist. The Middle East, she says, was not always wracked by conflict and in thrall to religious zealots. Music and poetry were once freer to flourish than they are now. Like Mr Lacey, Ms Ghattas identifies 1979 as the crucial year, but her book ranges more widely. In that year two “Islamic revolutions” began: one in Iran, which was obvious and sudden, and a slower upheaval in Saudi Arabia, initiated by the siege of the Grand Mosque.
. Ms Ghattas’s work reminds us that the shifts in their relationship will continue to have big implications for the rest of the region.Rajaa Alsanea had not intended to publish “Girls of Riyadh”, a novel based on her experiences, in English. She did not think that Westerners would be interested in four young women living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, who are the subjects of the book.
Abdelrahman Munif spent most of his career in the oil industry. It is therefore no surprise that the commodity drives the plot of his novel “Cities of Salt”. Although it is scarcely mentioned, it flows “invisibly through every page”, writes the translator, Peter Theroux. For the most part its effects are harmful. This Arabic epic, the first in a series of five , depicts how the American discovery of oil in 1938 upended a Bedouin community.
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