Saudi women writers belatedly came to the attention of the international literary scene in 2007, with Girls of Riyadh by Raja al-Sanae. This English translation of a 2004 Saudi novel, Banat al-Riyadh, is written in the form of emails exchanged between four young women. At home, it acted as a catalyst for a rash of Saudi mass-market novels with suggestive titles, such as Samar al-Migrin's Women of Vice and Athir Abdullah's I loved you more than I should, while in the West it fed a growing appetite for, and fascination with, works that reveal the secret lives of Muslim women. Represented in...