Celestial Bodies

Name: Celestial Bodies
Author: Jokha Alharthi
ISBN: 9781948226943

by Jokha Alharthi

Softcover

3.58

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Description

This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is "an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets" (The New York Times Book Review).In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.

Main Genre

Novels

Sub Genre

Miscellaneous

Format

Softcover

Pages

N/A

Price

16.50 €

Posts

All

kanelbolle•

Sep 12, 2025

I wanted to love this book so much... but I didn't.

This book has everything I love in a book. Delving into a - to me - foreign culture, themes of patriarchy and its negative impact on everyone, the struggles of women, the slow changes in society that come with time and progress. And yet I just couldn't connect to this book. There were A LOT of characters, which is usually no problem for me, but in combination with the non-linear storytelling that jumped wildly through the history of all those characters, it got confusing enough to become a struggle. The often praised poetry was just not for me (not this poetry specifically, just in general; I'm not a fan). But most of all, I just didn't like the characters. And the last few sentences left such a bad taste with me, that I wished I had stopped sooner. This book talks about important topics and I'm sure that many will love it, it just wasn't for me. But I think, if you're interested in reading it you should definitely give it a try and see for yourself. Your experience might be a very different one than mine.

storypals•

Sep 27, 2022

DNF... I love this book without reading it. I have a lot of history and some sort of attachment to it, though I can't really talk about it here. BUT. I just couldn't read it, maybe when I am older and wiser.