Have you heard the one about the Muslim, Jewish, Indian and Greek women who are looking for husbands?
That’s the multicultural set-up that forms the basis of a new novel by Randa Abdel-Fattah.
The Aussie writer, renowned for her successful young-adult fiction, has made a foray into the world of adult fiction with her latest release, No Sex in the City.
The novel revolves around the adventures of four Sydneysiders as they attempt to navigate cultural and societal norms in their quest to find Mr Right. Abdel-Fattah says writing her first tale for adults was a hugely satisfying experience.
“I was able to have fun with a storyline that I had been wanting to write about for some time, simply because of the comedic potential of matchmaking,” she says.
“I didn’t have to hold back, questioning whether a character was old enough to feel or think a certain way as yet.”
Despite targeting a different generation of readers, No Sex in the City continues with the theme of identity politics that has been central to Abdel-Fattah's previous works.
Born in Sydney to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, Abdel-Fattah attended a Catholic primary school before moving on to an Islamic high school when the first Gulf War began.
The anxiety and racial discrimination she suffered during those years planted the seeds for her 2005 debut novel, Does My Head Look Big in This?. The loosely autobiographical tale, which plays out over the course of a single school year, follows the experiences of Amal Abdel Hakim, who decides to begin the school term by wearing the hijab.
The novel’s pathos, politics and winning humour made it an immediate international success, with an Arabic translation available.
Abdel-Fattah followed it up with similarly themed and acclaimed tales, including 2006’s Ten Things I Hate About Me and 2008’s Palestine-based novel Where the Streets Had a Name.
A self-proclaimed activist, Abdel-Fattah puts the success of her novels down to looking beyond the stereotypical tales of Arab characters.
“It was a departure from the usual books that are about Muslims, written largely by people who aren’t Muslim,” she says.
“It didn’t fit with the ‘I’m so oppressed please rescue me’ narrative we find glorified in the niche of ‘exotic’ books about Muslim women as victims.”
Abdel-Fattah will expand on this subject when she appears at the Sharjah International Book Fair on Thursday on a panel titled The Communication of Words: Literature and Society’s Issues.
It also forms the basis of the novel she is working on, another young-adult tale, this time about an Australian teenager called Michael who’s forced to confront his prejudices after falling in love with Mina, an Afghan refugee.
Abdel-Fattah says the complicated lives of adolescents offer the perfect scenarios to discuss complex issues of race and politics.
“Writing in that moment of a person’s life has always felt so right to me,” she explains.
“Identity politics – whether as a minority in the West, as a person living under military occupation or as a young woman searching for love and purpose – is integral to our life journey.
“We just tend to think of the issue of identity in racial or religious terms when it is a question that consumes us all at every life stage.”
• Randa Abdel-Fattah will appear at Sharjah International Book Fair on Thursday at 7.15pm. Her session Communication of Words: Literature and Society’s Issues is at the Book Forum at The Expo Center Sharjah. For more details, visit www.sharjahbookfair.com