Excerpt from Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And where did she go?

When Othman had phoned and told him about his sister’s disappearance, he had sounded weaker than Nayir had ever heard him. “I’d give my blood,” he stammered, “if that would help find her.” In the long silence that followed, Nayir knew he was crying; he’d heard the choke in his voice. Othman had never asked for anything before. Nayir said he would assist.

For many years he had taken the Shrawi men to the desert. In fact, he’d taken dozens of families just like the Shrawis, and they were all the same: rich and pompous, desperate to prove that they hadn’t lost their Bedouin birthright even though for most of them the country’s dark wells of petroleum would always be more compelling than its topside. But Othman was different. He was one of the few men who loved the desert as much as Nayir and who had the brains to enjoy his adventures. He didn’t mount a camel until someone told him how to get off. He didn’t get sunburn. He didn’t get lost. Drawn together by a mutual love of the desert, he and Nayir had fallen into an easy friendship that had deepened over the years.

On the telephone Othman was so distraught that the story came out in confusing fragments. His sister was gone. She had run away. Maybe she’d been kidnapped. Because of their wealth, it was possible that someone wanted ransom money — but kidnappings were rare, and there was no ransom note yet. Only a day had passed, but it seemed long enough. Nayir had to pry to get the facts. No one knew exactly when she had left; they only noticed she was missing in the late afternoon. She had last been seen in the morning, when she told her mother she was going to the mall to exchange a pair of shoes. But by evening the family had discovered that other things were gone too: a pickup truck, the new black cloak she was saving for the honeymoon. When they realized that a camel was missing from the stables, they decided she’d run away to the desert.

Her disappearance had taken everyone by surprise. “She was happy,” Othman said. “She was about to get married.”

“Maybe she got nervous?” Nayir asked gently.

“No, she wanted this marriage.”

If there was more to the story, Othman wasn’t saying.

Nayir spent the next day making preparations. He refused the lavish payment the family offered, taking only what he needed. He hired fifty-two camels, contacted every desert man he knew, and even called the Ministry of the Interior’s Special Services to see if they could track her by military satellite, but their overhead optics were reserved for other things. Still, he managed to compose a search-and-rescue team involving several dozen men and a unit of part-time Bedouin who wouldn’t even look at Nouf’s picture, claiming that they didn’t need to, that there was only one type of woman for whom being stranded in the largest desert in the world was a kind of improvement on her daily life. The men developed a theory that Nouf had eloped with an American lover to escape her arranged marriage. It was hard to say why they all believed the idea. There had been a few cases of rich Saudi girls falling for American men, and they were shocking enough to linger in the collective memory. But it wasn’t as frequent as people supposed, and as far as Nayir knew, no Saudi girl had ever eloped to the desert.

The Shrawis asked Nayir to focus his search on one area of the desert, with radii extending outward from As Sulayyil. They stationed other search parties to the north and northwest, and one to the southwest. He would have liked more liberty to expand his operations at his own discretion, but as it was, he was hemmed in by strangers who seldom bothered to communicate with him. So he ignored the rules. Two days into it, he ordered his men to follow their instincts even if it took them into neighboring territory. If Nouf was still out there, her chances of survival decreased with every hour of daylight. This was no time to be formal, as if the search were a wedding dinner and the guests should be seated on their cushions just so.

Excerpted from Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris Copyright © 2008 by Zoë Ferraris. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.