The Occasional Virgin

A bold, tragicomic novel about two clever thirty-something women—successful in their careers but unlucky in love—from one of the most important Middle Eastern writers at work today.

On a sunny beach in the Italian Riviera, Yvonne and Huda relax by the sea. But as their vacation unfolds, their troubled pasts seep through to the present. Both women spent their childhoods in Beirut—Yvonne raised in a Christian family and Huda raised in the Muslim faith—and find that while they left their families behind, they are still unable to escape their families' reach. As the novel unfolds, and as the story moves back in time to Beirut, and then forward to London, both friends undertake their own quests for romance and love. Here we follow the tumultuous lives and occasionally shocking choices of these two complicated, deeply engaging women torn between the worlds they were born into and the worlds they've created for themselves. The Occasional Virgin is a witty and wry, poignant and perceptive novel for our time.

HANAN AL-SHAYKH, an award-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright, is the author of the short story collections I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops and One Thousand and One Nights; the novels The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London; and a memoir about her mother, The Locust and the Bird. She was raised in Beirut, educated in Cairo, and lives in London.