Literary places in the eastern desert

Cities of Salt

Abdelrahman Munif

When Americans arrive to drill for oil, the timeless desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun is bulldozed away and its people scattered, many washing up in the raw coastal boomtown of Harran, remade by the oil economy into a place of camps, wages and grievance. Munif's great banned epic of the Arabian oil age is drawn from the real eastern province of Saudi Arabia: the vanished oasis of the interior, the coming of the machines, and the segregated oil town on the Gulf where a new and bitter world is born.

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