Saudi women writers belatedly came to the attention of the international literary scene in 2007, with Girls of Riyadh by Raja al-Sanae. This English translation of a 2004 Saudi novel, Banat al-Riyadh, is written in the form of emails exchanged between four young women. At home, it acted as a catalyst for a rash of Saudi mass-market novels with suggestive titles, such as Samar al-Migrin's Women of Vice and Athir Abdullah's I loved you more than I should, while in the West it fed a growing appetite for, and fascination with, works that reveal the secret lives of Muslim women. Represented in these novels is a relatively privileged generation; through the licit use of the internet and international travel, they have been exposed to cosmopolitan mores and have come to expect basic levels of freedom of expression and movement. However, the international acclaim for al-Sanae was for the most part not accompanied by insights into where such novels could be situated in a Saudi literary canon.
This book explores and evaluates the achievements of Saudi women fiction writers from the 1960s up to the present day, many of whose works have yet to be published in English translation. It explores how succeeding literary generations approached the common theme of women's lives thwarted by practices and laws justified in the name of religion and culture, and how their writing is a form of resistance to oppressive patriarchal norms. Through themes such as `Gender and Violence', `Globalization, Women and the City', `Revealing and Concealing' and `Incarcerated Bodies', the book uses Saudi literature as a lens through which to explore what it means to be a woman in Saudi society today.