At a language school on the Pacific Ocean, 18-year-old Sylvia falls in love with a devastating young Saudi man named Malik. After obtaining two college degrees and marrying Malik, she accompanies him to his five-thousand-year-old city, Jeddah, situated by the Red Sea. She meets Malik's mother and grandmother, both of whom married when they were children of 11 or 12. In Jeddah, Sylvia loses all rights: to work with pay, to walk on the street or to have a telephone. Her college degrees are valueless in the eyes of the Saudi government. When she gives her husband money to buy a piece of land, the deed is in his name and she is barred inheritance. Duped into working at King Abdul Aziz University, she is refused a salary. Love struggles in this magical world of the seen and the unseen, where jinn and angels are as palpable as the sand of the desert. Sylvia merges into a coterie of Western women married to Saudis, all of whom rely on their hearts and wits to keep an even keel. The author tells not just her own story, but those of her friends as well as of Saudi women she came to love as fiercely as her own blood relatives. Here is a tale of the passionate human heart and the choices some women make to follow it.