Women of chess

Number of pages: 240 pages Publisher: Al-Adab Al-Arabi The novel "Women of Chess" spans two hundred forty pages of medium-sized format and is a social novel that conveys the reality of Saudi women in a society that still marginalizes their rights. The novel begins with the appointment of the teacher (Noura) at a government high school after she worked for seven years at a private elementary school. Despite the distance of the government school from her home, its poor facilities, and the suffering she faced dealing with students who are taller than her, come from poor and uneducated backgrounds; she appears happier as she begins her first week with a cleaning campaign for the teachers' room - with the participation of her colleagues and the worker Umm Saeed - and she buys herself a small desk and a projector to use in explaining her lessons to her students. The author did not pay much attention to the ending of her characters, as the events deviate from the usual or come contrary to expectations, ending in a natural way; yet, it did not fail to attract the reader's attention until the end of the novel. The novel was written mostly in the first person, except in rare cases where an external narrator appears, and it seems that their presence was merely a means to break the monotony.