progressive, educated, ahead of his time'. To his friends and colleagues in Saudi Arabia, Abdullah seems to have meshed his US education with his Saudi values they see him as a 'great man. They marry, over the objections of both families, and return to the kingdom, after Abdi has earned a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees. Thus when she meets Abdullah at college in Austin, his nationality makes him more, rather than less, attractive. Although her family moved back to Texas when she was 13, Rosalie develops a 'slow fixation on the peninsula.

Like the author, Rosalie was born in Saudi Arabia. While the marriage and the society are not metaphors for one another, there are parallels: both are rife with contradictions that rumble below the surface, with occasional eruptions both are predicated on the assumption that things won't - and shouldn't - change both preclude female independence, which Rosalie had known about the Kingdom but hadn't realised about her marriage until it was almost too late. What emerges from her portrait of the al-Baylani family and their friends is that they are all, literally or figuratively, expats - even Abdullah and the children, who were born in the kingdom and consider themselves Saudis. Her experience helps her to avoid the clichés of the standard expat novel she neither exoticises nor romanticises what it means to live 'with a foot in two worlds'. Parssinen herself was born in Saudi Arabia, a third-generation expat, and lived on an Aramco compound until she was 12. The crisis in the al-Baylani marriage precipitates a crisis for the entire family, which, in turn, illustrates the fissures that run through contemporary Saudi culture. Her progressive, educated husband has taken a second wife - and kept the marriage a secret for two years, even though the woman lives just down the road from Rosalie, in a house that Abdi bought for her. After decades of making her peace with the tenets of Islam that govern Saudi society, Rosalie confronts a cultural difference that explodes her complacency.

The novel is set in Saudi Arabia and focuses on the marriage of Saudi-born American Rosalie March, and her handsome, powerful Saudi husband, Abdullah al-Baylani. These questions are at the centre of Keija Parssinen's accomplished debut novel, The Ruins of Us, but with a twist that lifts the novel out of the standard 'story of a marriage' category. Why do people stay married? Or rather, how do people stay married? What series of compromises and alliances, conflicts and peace-makings, goes into a marriage that lasts for decades? Is there a point at which, eve n after 10, 20, 30 years, one or the other partner decides that enough is enough?

The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen