Later, Nayir receives a phone call from Othman who asks him to assist and lead an investigator into the desert to look for clues and footprints that may indicate what happened to Nouf. This means that Nouf at 16 and unmarried, was pregnant, a crime punishable by death in Islamic law. Surprisingly, the case is closed and the police are not investigating the possibility that Nouf was murdered.Īt the funeral services, Nouf is buried with her back to Mecca and Nayir sees this. The examiner confirms this saying that she drowned and also has blunt-force trauma to the head. Nayir asks to confirm that the body is in fact Nouf and when he sees her it seems as if she hasn't died from the desert heat.

Disappointed and aggrieved that he could not help his friend, he offers to pick up her body from the morgue before the funeral services.Īt the morgue, Nayir, a very pious Muslim man, meets Katya, the examiner's assistant and coincidentally Othman's fiancée. This is confirmed when her body is found in a wadi or an empty lake desert lakebed miles away from Nayir's desert camp. Nayir fears the worst - that the desert has killed her. She has been missing for ten days and is rumored to have run away. The novel begins with Nayir in the desert searching for the youngest sister of his dear friend Othman. The two main characters, Nayir and Katya, an unmarried man and woman, come together in an improbable way to solve a murder mystery of the elite and infamous Shrawi family's daughter. In Finding Nouf, Ferraris explores the tension between men and women in an Islamic nation. Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner in 2009 when the book was published.

Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris