Sand Fish

What happens when a free and self-reliant young woman is forced into society's restrictions?

Seventeen-year old Noora is not like the other women of the sun-battered mountains of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1950s. She shares their poverty and uncomplaining existence in the harshness around her, but carries a fiery independence, having grown up in an isolated dwelling with parents indifferent to the ways of society. With the death of her mother, her father sinks into a dazed madness. When her brother assumes responsibility and insists that she marry, Noora refuses, and flees in a huff to a nearby mountain village. While in hiding, she falls for the first man who's ever recognized her beauty and femininity, only to discover to her horror that he is already promised to another of the village's daughters. Shattered, Noora returns home to find that her father has disappeared and that her brother has arranged her marriage. She is to be third wife to a childless pearl merchant, and move to his "proper house" in a distant pearl diving village.

The shape of her new life by the sea is sketched right from the start. She is there for one reason: to provide the much-desired child. At night, she "performs her duty" by lying under the weight of her husband. By day, she faces the increasing impatience of the older first wife, and the jealously of the younger second wife. Her heart is full of fear that her inability to conceive might result in being thrown out of the house, with nowhere to go. She is miserable, until her husband's young apprentice shows an in interest in her, and soon, he and Noora get involved in a brief and intense affair, which leads to her pregnancy. Noora's panic is quelled when the household believes the baby is her husband's, and she guards her secret fiercely.

Noora remembers the sand fish, a desert skink she had spotted in her mountains. In its panic at her intrusion, it did only what was natural: it dove into the rocks, again and again, till it bashed its snout. Just like the sand fish, she is stuck in the wrong place, struggling to escape.

THE SAND FISH is a compelling and atmospheric look at what it means to be an independent young woman in the rigid social climate of the Middle East in the 1950s. Both a window to a culture and an inspiring, universal story of self-reliance, Gargash's debut novel promises to attract readers all over the world.