September Book Giveaway Contest

We’re switching it up a bit this month with the book giveaway. While darker than the recent books I’ve featured on my blog, this new release centers on strong women dealing with a culture notorious for expecting women to be quiet and unassuming. The setting: the clandestine underworld of the Middle East. The plot: a murder mystery where the female protagonist isn’t just battling the local police in her quest for justice, but also her own culture’s iron-fisted discriminatory views.

About the Book (from Amazon.com): Women in Saudi Arabia are expected to lead quiet lives circumscribed by Islamic law and tradition. But Katya, one of the few women in the medical examiner's office, is determined to make her work mean something.

When the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on the beach in Jeddah, the city's detectives are ready to dismiss the case as another unsolvable murder-chillingly common in a city where the veils of conservative Islam keep women as anonymous in life as the victim is in death. If this is another housemaid killed by her employer, finding the culprit will be all but impossible.

Only Katya is convinced that the victim can be identified and her killer found. She calls upon her friend Nayir for help, and soon discovers that the dead girl was a young filmmaker named Leila, whose controversial documentaries earned her many enemies.

With only the woman's clandestine footage as a guide, Katya and Nayir must confront the dark side of Jeddah that Leila struggled to expose: an underworld of prostitution, violence, exploitation, and jealously guarded secrets. Along the way, they form an unlikely alliance with an American woman whose husband has disappeared. Their growing search takes them from the city's car-clogged streets to the deadly vastness of the desert beyond.

In CITY OF VEILS, award-winning author Zoë Ferraris combines a thrilling, fast-paced mystery with a rare and intimate look into women's lives in the Middle East.

About the Author: 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) is now being published in twenty-five countries. A follow-up novel, “City of Veils,” was released August, 2010. She currently lives in San Francisco.

I will be drawing THREE winners on Friday, September 10^th. To enter, just leave a comment on this blog post (US and Canada entries only, please). Please remember to leave your email, so I have a means of contacting you if you are a winner.

Good luck!