BRIDE OF THE SEA

In this family saga split between two continents, a young Saudi American woman grapples with her itinerant, mysterious childhood.

It’s 1970, and Muneer’s relationship with his pregnant wife, Saeedah, is steadily deteriorating. He watches helplessly as she shovels snow in front of their Cleveland Heights, Ohio, rental house without wearing a coat or gloves and later walks into a freezing lake nearly naked. They have the baby—"The child will be OK, will be born beautiful and whole, will be named Hanadi”—but the couple gets divorced shortly after, and Muneer moves back to their hometown of Jidda, Saudi Arabia, while Saeedah and the baby stay in Ohio. Then, on Hanadi’s fifth birthday, Saeedah takes the girl and vanishes. In sections that jump across decades and shift between Muneer’s, Hanadi’s, and Saeedah’s perspectives, debut author Quotah gracefully charts the way this decision overturns the three family members’ lives. Muneer spends the next 12 years searching for his daughter with the help of a private investigator hired by his father-in-law, even as he works at a newspaper in Jidda, remarries, and has more children. Hanadi grows up longing for her father as she and Saeedah move around, from Toledo to San Francisco, while Saeedah works odd jobs under assumed names and flees whenever she notices anyone watching too closely. Eventually, when Hanadi—or Hannah, as she's now called—is 17, Muneer tracks her down. As she travels to Jidda to meet her relatives, she must navigate both her joy at discovering a family she didn’t know she had (“to have dozens of people feels like a gift, a gift of love that she never expected”) and resentment toward her mother for a lifetime of lies. Saeedah’s side of the story, in many ways the most intriguing, is also the most shadowy, and one wishes it were more fleshed out. But Quotah, born in Jidda to an American mother and Saudi father, depicts Saudi culture in engrossing detail, from fruit-scented shisha smoke to traditional wedding customs: “their relatives refuse to allow musical instruments at weddings—no lute, no dancing, no ‘Ya Layla Dana,’ no stereo, no songs by Amr Diab or Ragheb Alama. Only drumming and human voices, songs about God and the Prophet.”

A rich, finely rendered novel.