'INSTANTLY GRIPPING' JENNIFER EGAN

The lives of five women collide in the Arabian Gulf as each looks for a way to rewrite their future.

Dounia, a young Saudi finds herself alienated and alone as she prepares for motherhood in an air-conditioned mansion in the middle of the desert.

After losing her home and baby in a natural disaster, Flora does the unthinkable and leaves her surviving child in the Philippines to become an overseas domestic worker.

Pushed by her family to marry a jihadist, Zeinah, a Syrian woman finds herself joining the city's morality police.

Justine uproots her progressive New York family to curate an exhibit in Abu Dhabi, where she must reckon with her ethical limitations.

And Eskedare, a spirited and defiant Ethiopian teenager, flees an arranged marriage to search for her friend.

The consequences of their meetings are devastating and profound as they all discover how far they're willing to go in order to survive.

Written with unsettling intimacy and fierce empathy, GULF is a blazingly powerful and original novel about cruelty, rebellion and resilience.

Most of all it's about the power of hope.

"'Ogrodnik achieves what only a debut novelist of fierce moral clarity and cinematic instinct could attempt: She plunges headlong into the fissures of contemporary womanhood stretched across the blazing, glittering mirage of the Arabian Peninsula . . . The novel's power lies in the dissonant harmony of its five interlinked stories . . . In this, Gulf belongs on the shelf beside Rankine's Citizen, Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, and Sebald's Austerlitz . . . This book belongs in classrooms, in human rights archives and on nightstands . . . This fiction as an invocation, as an exorcism and as a protest. This is the kind of book women pass to each other in silence, across borders and across time. And we are changed. And we are seen'" - Dawn Journal