'The Zanzibar Wife'
Author: Deborah Rodriguez
Publisher: Sphere / 2017
Pages: 301
In October 2015 I introduced Deborah Rodriguez to my readers.
Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of an international help organisation in the wake of the Russians leaving Afghanistan and the Americans (and Taliban) moving in.
She began helping young Afghan women to learn hairdressing so that they could set up a business and hopefully live by it.
In her books, one a successful novel, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, followed by Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul and a semi-biographical book The Kabul Beauty School Deborah writes about this experience.
She tried to mask her teaching experience and the girls' names in the stories she tells but she was later attacked for not hiding the details enough and thus endangering the girls' lives.
Besides, she fell in love and married her lover only to find out years later he had already been married and had a family he never told her about.
Then as things became harder, she had to escape and we now find her living in Mexico. Still, her past ability is still with her - she now runs a school for underprivileged girls. And she still writes. This book is one of the books of her later stage.
The location is far from Afghanistan - it is now Oman and Zanzibar on the East Coast of Africa.
The focus is on three women, each remarkable in their own way - Rachel, an American war photographer who is desperately trying to forget the traumas she witnessed in her work, Arianna, a bubbly English woman who has rashly volunteered to be Rachel's "fixer", a job she has never done in a country she knows nothing about; and Miza, a young woman living far from her beloved homeland of Zanzibar, the second wife of Tariq having to remain a secret from his terrifying "other" wife, Maryam.
Until the day when Tariq fails to come home.
These three women will quickly learn that in Oman things aren't always what they appear to be.
A bewitching story of clashing cultures, of secrets and of revelations.