Finding Nouf

By: Zoe Ferraris

Narrated by: Pete Bradbury

Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

Zoe Ferraris' debut novel is hailed as a startling, richly textured work. With Finding Nouf, Ferraris delivers an electrifying page-turner that is at once a murder mystery and an intriguing glimpse into the culture of Saudi Arabia.

Nayir al-Sharqi, known by his friends for religious piety and his Bedouin-like knowledge of the desert, lends his assistance to a wealthy family when their soon to-be-married daughter Nouf goes missing. After a short search, the girl is found dead, apparently drowned in the desert during a freak deluge. Something about her death doesn't sit well with Nayir, however, and he makes an uncomfortable alliance with a female coroner's technician to determine what really happened.

The riveting mystery in Finding Nouf is complemented by the novel's engaging protagonist, whose romantic awakening will linger long in readers' thoughts.

©2008 Zoe Ferraris (P)2008 Recorded Books, LLC

pronounce correctly please!!!!!!!!!!!!!

usually Pete is a great narrator but if you do this professionally, the very least you can do is to look up the few words that should be pronounced correctly considering the story takes place in a foreign country. I don't speak Arabic but I read a lot of books that take place in the middle East and every time it is an English speaking narrator they can't even pronounce the most basic word. It really does distract from the narrative.

Unchallenged segregation

I've read two books about deeply segregated societies. "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" and this one. Maya Angelou laid bare the ruin that segregation wrecks upon its victims. This author and this book seem to think that segregation are something that simply needs to be presented as unexamined facts.

The facts of life for women in modern Saudi Arabia are startling and horrifying. Yet more horrifying is the writer's failure to engage this galling injustice critically. Dressing segregation in the trappings of piety does not make it pious. All the sinister blood and marrow of segregation remain just beneath the cloth.

I hope never to read a book so gripped in cognitive dissonance again. The reader's only option for peaceful reading is acceptance. Through this subversion, the reader becomes as complicit as the hostages of the real world society, telling themselves, "It's okay..."

Whether it comes with alleged eternal life or separate and unequal schools, segregation is not and will never be okay.

More about culture than story

The story was light, it was 80% about Saudi culture. I knew getting in that it would have some of this but I expected a reasonable balance between culture and story. To the author's credit, she did a good job of showing the culture without disdain or apology. But the story really feel flat.

The narrator did a terrible job of pronouncing names and Arabic words. If you're a professional narrator, and are going to read a book with foreign names and words, spend some time researching how to pronounce them correctly. Instead he went on with the caricature like Achmed, it's not Russian, it's Arabic, yes it's guttural but it's not kh, it's H.