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Zoe Ferraris Books In Order

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Publication Order of Nayir Sharqi & Katya Hijazi Books

Finding Nouf / The Night of the Mi'raj (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
City of Veils (2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
Kingdom of Strangers (2012)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of The Galaxy Pirates Books

Hunt for the Pyxis (2015)Description / Buy at Amazon

Zoe Ferraris
Zoe Ferraris was born in the year 1970 in Oklahoma. She moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. In the year 2006, she finished her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University.

She met her now ex-husband in San Francisco, and she fell totally in love with him. She found him brilliant, hilarious, and over-the-top zany.

Zoe lived in a conservative Muslim community for nine months with her then-husband and the rest of his family, who is a group of Saudi-Palestinians. It began as just a visit to introduce her and their daughter to his family, but found they had to stay until his mother-in-law stopped having heart episodes each and every time you head to the airport. After returning to America, they were married for another year, and then divorced and he went back to Jeddah.

This experience led to her writing novels set in Saudi Arabia. Her character Nayir was originally supposed to be a religious policeman, but she realized chasing women down the street was never going to be a modest occupation.

Nayir wound up being a compilation of three other guys she knew while in Saudi, all of them were looking for a wife and not one of them was successful. Largely because they were the good guys that didn’t want to break the rules by speaking to any strange women.

While at a jacket bazaar in Jeddah, her ex-husband bough a Columbo type coat and proposed to set off in order to solve mysteries. Zoe liked the idea of a Muslim detective that likes Columbo. The novel’s main mystery began evolving while she started realizing that, since Nayir is so proper, something pretty drastic would need to happen, like murder, so that he would be able to justify prying into some woman’s life.

Zoe decided to write a novel, rather than a memoir, in order to have the best of both worlds. She got to write about Saudi, but was able to have them do things she wanted to do, rather than anybody just doing what they wanted. Like a lot of writers, she put in her application to be God, and then sat back and framed the rejection slip.

“The Night of the Mir’aj” was nominated for a Macavity Award for Best First Novel in the year 2009. She received a YALSA Alex Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Art Seidenbaum for First Fiction for “Finding Nouf”.

Her debut novel, called “The Night of the Mir’aj”, was released in the year 2008. Her work is from the children’s fiction and mystery genres.

“The Night of the Mir’aj” is the first novel in the “Katya Hijazi” series and was released in the year 2008. Nayir, a Palestinian born desert guide, is an outsider among all the well-to-do families in Jeddah. When Nouf ash-Shrawi, who is the sixteen year old daughter of a wealthy Saudi disappears right before her arranged marriage, Nayir is just the guy the Shrawis trust to bring her back. Just days later Nouf’s body is discovered in a desert wadi, but Nayir’s task is still not over, as he feels compelled to discover all the disturbing circumstances that surround her death.

His quest takes him a long way away from his natural terrain, away from the empty skies and endless dunes out in the desert and into Jeddah. It is a city filled with foreigners’ compounds, oppressive monuments, and shuttered apartments.

Most troubling of all, is that his investigations require him to work with Katya Hijazi, who is a forensic scientist.he finds that he has to struggle with emotions he has battled with his entire life to repress. He must also fight with loyalties he never once questioned: to his faith, old friends, and a culture where women take secrets to their very graves.

“City of Veils” is the second novel in the “Katya Hijazi” series and was released in the year 2010. The corpse of a savagely beaten woman is discovered on the beach in Jeddah, Detective Ibrahim dreads working on another unsolvable murder. This is something eerily common in a place where veils of conservative Islam keep the women just as anonymous in life as a victim is in death.

However, Katya, who is one of the few women in the coroner’s office, is bound and determined to identify the woman and locate her killer. Aided by Nayir, her friend, she quickly finds finds that the victim was a controversial young filmmaker named Leila. Could it have been Leila’s connection to the incendiary Koranic scholar or possibly a missing American guy that wound up getting her killed?

“Kingdom of Strangers” is the third novel in the “Katya Hijazi” series and was released in the year 2012. A secret grave is discovered in the desert and reveals the corpses of nineteen women and the stunning truth that a serial killer has operated undetected in Jeddah for over a decade.

However, Ibrahim Zahrani (a lead inspector) gets distracted by a mystery that hits closer to home. His mistress has disappeared, but he can’t report that she has gone missing because adultery is punishable by death. Without anywhere to turn, Ibrahim brings the case to Katya, one of the few women in the entire police department. Drawn into both of the investigations, she has to be increasingly careful to hide one secret of her own.

“Hunt for the Pyxis” is the first novel in the “Galaxy Pirates” series and was released in the year 2015. On the night that Emma Garton’s supposedly boring parents get kidnapped, she gets forced to confront the truth that they have been lying to her about many things. The most important one? They are not even from planet Earth.

To locate her dad and mom, Emma and Herbie (her best friend) has to leave Earth and enter the waterways of space, called the Strands, where the giant galleons ply intergalactic oceans. A journey through constellations will not be easy, certainly not every scoundrel in the galaxy determined to locate them.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Zoe Ferraris

One Response to “Zoe Ferraris”

  1. Ms: 2 years ago

    Will you be writing more of the Katya Hijazi novels? Loved those!

    Reply

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