Safia Moore and Sawad Hussain give their views of Fadi Zaghmout’s debut novel, The Bride of Amman, a bloggish book on life and sexual freedom in Jordan:

By Safia Moore

Zaghmout talking about his book.

Released in English this summer, Fadi Zaghmout’s novel The Bride of Amman is a sharp and sensitive exposé of Jordanian society through the voices of young people constrained by conservatism and blatant discrimination.  The confessional tone is entirely appropriate since chapters are allocated to characters, each telling their individually unique, yet linked stories, hopping between the present and the past, with one eye always on the future.  This structure privileges the reader with insider knowledge, and the fast-paced slices of life often read like private blog posts.  Indeed, Salma, described by her grandmother as “an unplucked fruit left to rot” because of her unmarried status at thirty, writes an anonymous, popular and highly didactic…