After her mother’s suicide, Jay takes the opportunity to leave America and visit Damhoor, the homeland of her late father, as a volunteer emergency doctor. It is there that she meets Malek, a skilled surgeon. Struggling together to save lives in the field, a strong attraction gradually forms between the two of them. However, their feelings for one another are by no means sweet or gentle. As Sheikh, Malek is obligated to inherit Damhoor’s throne. And so, knowing Malek’s anguish, Jay makes a certain decision… This is a grand scale medical romance!

Charmed by a mother and her little girl Heart surgeon Melissa Cartwright is traveling to Zaheer to tell Sheikh Arun Rahman al'Kawali she is pregnant with his child. She wants nothing from him—she guards her heart as fiercely as he guards his. The Arun learns of Melissa's baby bombshell, and for him marriage is the only answer. Yet before she can accept the sheikh surgeon's proposal, Melissa needs to be sure of his love.

This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern literature, offers cutting edge research into the textual and cultural legacy of the Middle Ages: a significant and growing area of scholarship. At the juncture of literary, cultural and gender studies, and capitalizing on a renewed interest in popular western representations of the Islamic east, this book proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.

Surgeon Zayed Khalil is formidable, yet scarred. The only solace he finds is in his work. He's dedicated, professional and brilliant. And he's come to Penhally Bay to set up a specialist children’s until at St. Piran Hospital. Emily Livingston is in awe of her new boss, but she's noticed the pain behind his dark eyes. Her instinct to reach out to him is as overwhelming as the underlying attraction between them. But Zayed closed his heart long ago. Could this beautiful young doctor be the woman to show him how to live again, even love again?

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.

Includes list of members.