Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Kim BarnesFrom the PEN USA Award-winning author of A Country Called Home, a richly imagined new novel about a young woman who leaves the dusty farmland of 1960s Oklahoma to follow her husband to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and finds a world of wealth, glamour, American privilege, and corruption.
Raised by her grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, in a two-room shack, Gin Mitchell secures a better, happier life for herself when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. But even her wildest dreams can't prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job at the Arabian American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia. In the desert city of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a house with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back - Gin suddenly has the life she's only read about. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead in the bay, Gin's world closes in around her and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. Set in a gorgeously etched desert landscape, In the Kingdom of Men is an enthralling novel of greed and deceit, of Americans out of their depth in Saudi Arabia, and of a marriage moving inexorably toward ruin.
Kim Barnes is a genius. I got so swept away in the company of her ruthless, ruthful, grasping men that for the space of 314 pages I was Virginia Mae (Gin) McPhee. Thanks to Barnes's masterly personification, Gin breaks the bonds of the mere mundane fictional heroine - cuts the marionette strings as it were - and blooms into an irrepressible everywoman...continued
Full Review
(497 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
In In the Kingdom of Men, Gin McPhee finds herself plopped inside an ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) compound in the 1960s, an oasis that is neither wholly American nor Arabic but is somehow an incongruous mashup within a country still grappling with the culture shock wrought by 20th century capitalism. But what did that culture shock look like in real life?
Eons of social and economic tradition had established a tight symbiotic relationship between Arab desert nomads (Bedouin) and the stationary farmers and villagers; nomads tended to the grazing livestock while the stationary families produced consumable goods, from tent poles to dates. Very few people were wage earners. It had always been a mostly self-contained, life-...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked In the Kingdom of Men, try these:
by Miriam Toews
Published 2012
That rare coming-of-age story able to blend the dark with the uplifting, Irma Voth follows a young Mennonite woman, vulnerable yet wise beyond her years, who carries a terrible family secret with her on a remarkable journey to survival and redemption.
by Audrey Schulman
Published 2012
Evoking both Barbara Kingsolver and Andrea Barrett, this enthralling fiction, wise and generous, explores some of the crucial social and cultural challenges that, over the years, have come to shape our world.