The Consequences of Love
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
It is summer in Jeddah but Naser's life seems bleak. An immigrant in an unfriendly land, his friends have fled town for cooler climes and left him to his dead-end job and the scrutiny of the religious police, who keep watch through the shaded windows of their government jeeps. He spends his time writing to his mother in Africa and yearning to meet a woman - but in a country that separates men and women with walls and veils he feels increasingly trapped. Then, one of the black-clad women drops a piece of paper at his feet, instructing him to follow her pink shoes and suddenly his black-and-white life blooms into colour.
But relationships between unmarried men and women are illegal under the strict Wahhibism of Saudi state rule - and it's not long before their forbidden love must face the hardest test of all...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Addonia's bold debut is more compelling as an indictment of the repressiveness of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism than as a love story. In 1979, Naser's mother arranges for him and his brother, Ibrahim, to be smuggled from a Sudanese refugee camp into Jeddah and the care of a fundamentalist uncle. Naser learns to despise and fear the hate-mongering local imam, merciless religious police and powerful men who lust after boys with impunity. He never stops feeling homesick for his mother and her friends or frustrated by the Saudi's strict segregation of the sexes, and when a young woman drops a love letter at his feet, he's quickly smitten. The girl he calls Fiore (flower) is bold, passing him notes and wearing pink shoes to be recognizable in her abaya. Addonia's prose, unfortunately, loses credibility when he describes their passion. Both lovers risk public flogging or even execution, but neither doubts their relationship's correctness. The consequences they fear are of daring to love in a society dominated by hatred of foreigners, nonbelievers, women and often of love itself. Addonia's troubling revelations make for thought-provoking reading.
