Gulf

(Paperback)

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Description

These are the women whose stories you never hear.

Dounia, a young Saudi mother finds herself alienated as she prepares for motherhood in an air-conditioned box in the middle of the desert, surrounded by construction and yet completely isolated.

Flora, after losing everything in a natural disaster, feels she must do the unthinkable: leave her surviving child behind in the Philippines as she departs to become an overseas domestic worker.

Zeinah, a Syrian woman who has been pushed by her family to marry a jihadist, finds herself joining the city's morality police.

Justine uproots her progressive New York family when she's tapped to curate an exhibit in Abu Dhabi, where she must reckon with her moral and ethical limitations.

And Eskedare, a spirited and defiant Ethiopian teenager, flees a dreaded arranged marriage to search for her only friend, only to find her dreams dead-end in the Gulf.

Written with unsettling intimacy and determined empathy, GULF is a book about cruelty, rebellion, resilience - and hope. It asks the question: how far would you go in order to survive

Reviews

GULF is instantly gripping: a hurtling, sensory plunge into the lives of women in crisis whose worlds come to overlap in unexpected ways. Mo Ogrodnik is a gifted, arresting newcomer to the literary landscape. -- Jennifer Egan, author of THE CANDY HOUSE

Author Bio

Mo Ogrodnik teaches writing, directing, and film production at Tisch. She was the Associate Dean of the Arts for NYU, Abu Dhabi and the Founder/Director of FIND - a creative institute documenting the transnational landscape of the UAE through the lens of artists, scholars, and technologists. She's also mentored filmmakers from the MENA region at the Sundance Lab in Jordan.

In 2018, she received her MFA from the NYU Fiction program in Paris. She received two research grants; one enabled her to travel to the Philippines where she spent time at a domestic training center with forty women who were being deployed to Saudi Arabia; the other was to Ethiopia, where she traveled and interviewed Gulf-return girls who had been illegally trafficked through Yemen.