I guess the ministry of information has finally given its permission for Banat Al-Riyadh to be distributed in the local market. You can find the a big amount of copies of the controversial novel now in the major bookstores here in Riyadh, such as Jarir, Tohama, and others. On a related note, I’ve read this piece in NY Times on the rise of chick lit in some unexpected spots in the world, which got me wondering if we are going to see a Saudi writer brave enough to tackle this genre. At the end of the article, they say that neither “Bridget Jones’s Diary” nor any of Helen Fielding’s other books have been translated into Arabic; something that can be, according to the newspaper, “another great frontier” for this type of novels. I read “Bridget Jones’s Diary” a few years ago, I really liked it, and I think that chick lit can be a big hit in Saudi Arabia, as well as the rest of the Arab World.