Her first novel, Ajwan, was published in 2012 and won the Best YA Book Award of the Etisalat Children's Books Award in 2013.[2] Al Noman said that she wrote the novel because she was unable to find young adult science fiction in Arabic for her daughter to read, noting that both teenage fiction and science fiction were virtually non-existent in Arabic. The novel follows the titular heroine, a 19-old girl, on an interplanetary quest to rescue her infant son from a nefarious organization who wants to turn him into a super-soldier. According to al Noman, the plot reflects contemporary political concerns in Arabic countries, in that it describes "men who have a hidden agenda to acquire power, and they use the pain and suffering of minorities or marginalised peoples to turn them into their own private armies".[3]