Against the backdrop of the long-running confrontation between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program, two ambitious young Palestinians from the ancient city of Nablus find themselves caught on opposing sides of Dubai’s shadowy world of espionage, finance, and deception.
The two antiheroes in Dean Dilley’s novel Nablus Girl (Savington Press, 2022) come from sharply different social classes. Aisha belongs to a prominent family, while Amir is the son of a struggling and deeply dysfunctional household. Their story also carries a Gatsby-like element: Amir, ambitious and hopelessly in love with Aisha, tries to transform himself into someone worthy of her. His pursuit of a career in international finance eventually takes him to Dubai, where the private ambitions of both characters become entangled in the wider struggle between the United States and Iran.
There, local sheikhs, Iranian agents, Western intelligence officers, and international bankers play their own versions of the “Great Game,” all circling the enormous pools of money controlled by the Iranian regime.
Dilley’s superbly written novel is rich in humor, particularly in its depiction of the self-important and occasionally absurd academic culture of the fictional Nablus College, where Amir and Aisha study and first encounter one another.
Aisha—beautiful, intelligent, and defiantly self-possessed—openly mocks an English professor whose seminars appear to be assembled from internet searches and whose readings of Moby Dick and other literary works are invariably filtered through anti-American politics. She refers to him derisively as “Dooctor Fah-ty.” The professor, for his part, has difficulty dealing with women generally and with strong, opinionated women in particular—a failing the novel traces, with mordant humor, to an unhappy romantic episode during his student days in Utah.
Amir discovers a passion for stock trading while living in his parents’ home and begins pursuing a career in investment management after taking a finance course. His instructor, an understated and accomplished American, is rumored by envious colleagues—the largely vain and morally compromised professors of Nablus College—to be a CIA operative.
Fortune appears to favor Amir when he secures an interview with Burr Acheson, a major American investment firm with offices in Dubai. His mother, Chief Nurse Hala, vehemently opposes the trip for reasons Amir does not understand. The mystery surrounding her objections becomes one of the novel’s most important strands.
Amir nevertheless makes his way to Dubai, where he eventually joins Bank von Raab, an obscure Liechtenstein institution that manages investments for wealthy local families. He soon discovers that neither the bank nor its clients are necessarily what they appear to be.
Aisha also finds her way to Dubai, presenting herself as a sophisticated interior designer. Behind that polished exterior, however, she is pursuing ambitions and obligations of her own.
To say much more would diminish the pleasures of Nablus Girl, which is both a page-turner and a literary entertainment. Its account of covert conflict between Iran and the West also gives the novel renewed relevance amid the continuing instability of the Middle East.
At a time when nearly everything is treated as political, Dilley’s novel resists becoming a political tract. Amir feels trapped in Nablus, a city hemmed in by Israeli military occupation and scarred by political violence, but his deepest desire is personal rather than ideological: he wants to escape an unloving family and a future that appears already determined for him.
Yet Amir is also naïve, emotionally vulnerable, and poorly equipped to understand the forces gathering around him. Aisha, by contrast, is cynical, disciplined, and ruthless in her determination to escape the restricted opportunities of her native city.
Amir dreams of a romantic relationship with Aisha, the Nablus Girl of the novel’s title
In a wide-ranging interview about Nablus Girl, Dilley discussed the elaborate campaigns of deception employed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the ways in which those campaigns shape the lives of the novel’s characters.
“I wanted to capture some of the brutality in the region, particularly as it relates to the historic tensions between Persians and Arabs and to the conflict between Iran and the United States,” Dilley says. “I was especially interested in the methods by which the IRGC recruits and manipulates individuals.”
For Dilley, the cruelty of such operations lies partly in their duration. People may be treated as pieces in a strategic game that began long before they understood their own involvement in it. The operatives administering the deception become so accustomed to manipulation that they lose sight of its human consequences.
Dilley deliberately leaves some questions unresolved. Rather than explaining every character’s future, the novel ends with uncertainties that invite the reader to imagine what may follow.
“I wanted the reader to remain intrigued by the uncertainties surrounding Aisha,” he says. “That does not necessarily mean I intend to write a sequel, but I wanted to leave open the possibility of a future beyond the final page.”
The novel is also, Dilley emphasizes, a story about strong women.
“I wanted to challenge the common American misconception that Arab women are submissive or subjugated,” he says, drawing upon his work as a lawyer in the Middle East.
“In my experience,” he says, “they are formidable.”
“Aisha is a ruthless character,” Dilley adds. “Amir is desperately in love with her, but the imbalance between them is profound.”
Dubai’s underworld
Among the novel’s greatest strengths is Dilley’s depiction of Dubai’s financial underworld and the gradual process by which Amir becomes entangled in it.
His boss at Bank von Raab, Katrina Vanderlip, assigns him the task of attracting funds whose origins are plainly questionable. When Amir attempts to instruct her on local culture, she sharply reminds him that he understands far less about Dubai—and about the bank’s business—than he supposes.
At first, the reader cannot be certain whether Vanderlip represents a criminal enterprise, a legitimate financial institution, an intelligence service, or some combination of the three. That
ambiguity contributes substantially to the novel’s suspense.
“By the time Amir lectures his boss about local culture, Vanderlip has been in Dubai for many years,” Dilley explains. “She knows precisely what is happening and has no patience with Amir’s naïveté.”
Money laundering, covert finance, and the complicity of seemingly respectable institutions form an essential part of the novel’s setting. In this novel, Dubai’s gleaming towers and extravagant wealth conceal a world in which intelligence operations, questionable private banking, political violence, and personal ambition readily converge.
In Nablus Girl, that hidden world becomes the stage upon which two young Palestinians attempt to escape the limitations of their past—only to discover that reinvention carries dangers of its own.
