Girls of Riyadh

Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea tells the story of four young-adult women in Saudi Arabia, looking for love but living in a world with little freedom and many demands. Originally released in Arabic in 2005, the novel was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia. After four months, permission was granted for its distribution; the book has been a best-seller across much of the Middle East and in the United States and Europe.

The main characters are upper-class (“velvet class”) Saudi women: Gamrah, Sadeem, Michelle, and Lamees. Though they have different life experiences, they are all facing similar obstacles when it comes to love. The unnamed narrator sends out a weekly newsletter to a growing list of subscribers, telling the stories of each of these women while denying that she is one of them.

Gamrah is a conservative girl in an arranged marriage. Friends and neighbors are a bit envious of her good fortune because a woman alone is a woman scorned. After they move to America, where her husband is studying for a PhD, she discovers that he has been having an affair with a Japanese woman and has married Gamrah only to maintain the tradition in his family. She returns to Riyadh, divorced, ashamed, and with child. She is shunned by society.



The girls of Riyadh are not allowed to speak to men in public. However, they all have phones – so they constantly text. The restrictions on the young women are many, including not being allowed drive or to go out in public unless accompanied by a man. Michelle, a half-American, half-Saudi woman, is the most liberal of the girls. She gets around the oppressive rules by dressing up as a boy and pretending to be her friend’s brother.

Michelle is deeply in love with Faisal, and he is in love with her. Her high hopes soon crash, however, when he heeds his mother’s warnings, deciding that her mixed heritage is not a desirable trait. Despite his love for her, he follows the strict tradition, breaking off their courtship. Thus, Michelle is stuck somewhere in the middle of Saudi culture; she is too Western to be eligible for marriage to a Saudi man and too Saudi to marry an American. So, she moves to start a freer life in Dubai.

Sadeem, on the other hand, is about to marry a man she truly loves. Driven by passion, Sadeem and her soon-to-be-husband, Walid, break the rules and spend a night together before they are married. After their night together, however, Walid changes his mind and ends their engagement. Thus, Sadeem is also shunned from Saudi society for losing her virginity before marriage.



Only Lamees achieves the happy ending that the others strive for. She combines the modernity of Michelle with the devotion of Gamrah, successfully choosing her own mate and her own job without abandoning the culture and ideals completely. This happy medium perhaps makes her the least relatable, compared to the other three who have much more vivid stories of heartbreak, culture clash, and pain.

As the novel continues, the narrator answers both hate mail and fan mail, slowly delivering more details of each girl’s story while still refusing to identify herself. She illustrates how this group of friends with very different personalities questions everything from love to religion to tradition, asking questions they are not supposed to ask and thinking thoughts forbidden to think (especially for women).

The novel has often been referred to as the Saudi version of Sex and the City due to its narrative structure, content, and love-obsessed characters. However, despite the similarities, Girls of Riyadh deals with a much different world. The love affairs are illicit, with real, enduring consequences. The families are much more involved, making decisions for their daughters and trying to ensure they stay on the straight and narrow. The women are all successful in their own right, studying to be doctors, holding down jobs, and even opening a party-planning business together, but at the forefront of it all is finding love – and the right kind of love. The book is not about abandoning heritage, and it is not a poison-pen letter against Saudi culture. Rather, it is about finding fulfillment and happiness within one’s own circumstances.