Veiled Horizons: A Memoir

The paradox at the heart of this book is unexpected and precise: the culture presumed to confine her becomes the first place that allows her space. Veiled Horizons is not merely a memoir of an expatriate woman in a foreign land, nor a story of escape. It is a story of emergence.

Widowed early and carrying unresolved loss, Vandana Sharma arrives in Saudi Arabia a stranger and discovers solitude not as absence, but as power. Over eleven years, much of it spent on the Farasan Islands, an unexpected freedom of becoming takes root in a place known for restriction, and identity begins to form, almost imperceptibly, in midlife and in silence.