When Nayir brings Nouf’s body to the morgue to prepare for her funeral, he encounters a lab assistant named Katya Hijazi. He agrees, ashamed that he had been unable to find her himself. She is miles from Nayir’s base camp, and the Shrawi family asks Nayir to return her body to them. Not long after Nayir is back in Jeddah, a traveling group finds Nouf’s body in a wadi, which is an empty lakebed in the desert. Finally, he is forced to admit his mission has failed and returns to the Shrawi family empty-handed.

Nouf has now been missing for 10 days, and Nayir can find no sign of her. Othman asks Nayir to help because he has led many successful search-and-rescue missions before. She disappeared three days before her arranged marriage. The sister, Nouf ash-Shrawi, is the 16-year-old daughter of the prominent Shrawi family. The story begins with Nayir al-Sharqi, a Palestinian desert guide, looking for his friend Othman’s missing younger sister in the desert. This dichotomy in perspective allows the reader to see both the male and female point of view, which directly support the novel’s prominent gender themes. The narrative is told in the third person and alternates between the perspectives of the two central characters, Nayir al-Sharqi and Katya Hijazi. Ferraris completed her MFA from Columbia University in 2006. There, she lived with her husband in a conservative Muslim community, and her experiences informed the development of this novel. Ferraris, native to San Francisco, lived in Saudi Arabia for several years after the Gulf War. The psychological narrative explores tensions between the sexes in a country ruled by an oppressive Islamic regime. Zoë Ferraris’s Finding Nouf is a 2009 mystery novel set in Saudi Arabia.

Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris