The Occasional Virgin
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Yvonne and Huda have come a long way. Attractive, successful and glamorous, their brilliant ascent has flung them far from Lebanon, and each other.
Now it's only on their rarely snatched holidays that the friends can catch up. As they swim, drink and talk by the glittering Italian Riviera, Huda and Yvone ponder just how complicated it is to be free – and the eternal mysteries of love, sex, and getting a guy to call you back.
Then, amid the glitz and chatter of London's Mayfair, a chance encounter brings their past rushing back. But Huda has a wicked trick her sleeve…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irony and iconoclasm are the orders of the day in al-Shaykh's bittersweet tale of friendship and disillusionment. Both Huda, raised Muslim, and Yvonne, a Christian, consider themselves fortunate to have escaped their native Lebanon's rigid patriarchy and conservative religiosity. During the country's civil war, each was sent away to the West and chose never to return. Years later, both women are professionally successful but personally unfulfilled. Huda is plagued by self-doubt and Yvonne is desperate to have a child. Following a weekend getaway to the Italian Riviera that only serves to dredge up painful childhood memories for both women, they reunite in London, where Huda is directing a play. After a series of tense altercations with religious extremists, the two women embark on a revenge plot against a man who denounces Huda for being an imperfect Muslim. This plan quickly backfires or does it? Dialogue is at times stilted and laden with exposition or doing some heavy ideological lifting for the benefit of Western readers. But al-Shaykh (The Story of Zahra), who has drawn both admiration and condemnation in her native Lebanon for frank depictions of women's sexuality and criticism of women's powerlessness in traditional social structures, continues to grapple with these issues in ways both farcical and profound. It's the small moments of both absurdity and genuine pathos that will remain with readers, as Yvonne and Huda struggle to reconcile where they came from with who they've become.