A Transparent Black Shirt

A thoughtful, profound and often moving collection of short stories about womanhood in the Middle East, brought to us by an important new Saudi literary voice.

From the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the quotidian to the sublime, in forty-five short stories, A Transparent Black Shirt explores what it means to be a Muslim woman in contemporary Middle Eastern society.

By turns moving, evocative, outrageous, exhilarating, contemplative and funny, this is a thoughtful collection of narratives about womanhood in the Middle East, exploring important issues or society and morality.

Part of Nomad Publishing’s range of authors in translation, painting a vivid picture of Arabia at a time of astonishingly rapid change.

Laila Al-Ahedib was born in Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia, in 1965. She is a short story writer, novelist, and literary critic as well as being a member of the Women’s Committee at the Riyadh Literary Club. Laila held the position of Director of the Educational Media Department in Riyadh Education from 2000 to 2015 and is Professor of Arabic Literature at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Rome Sapienza in Italy.

She is the author of two other collections of short stories published in English and she writes a weekly column, Transformations of a River Woman for Al-Yamamah magazine.