Celestial Bodies is the International Booker-winning and internationally bestselling novel
from Jokha Alharthi. Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman we encounter three sisters:
Mayya who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak Asma who marries from a sense of duty and
Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved who has emigrated to Canada. These
three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional slave-owning society
slowly redefining itself after the colonial era to the crossroads of its complex present.
Elegantly structured and taut Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel telling of
Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves. PRAISE FOR
CELESTIAL BODIES "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” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "The great pleasure of
reading Celestial Bodies is witnessing a novel argue through the achieved perfection of its
form for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct. The ability to move freely
through time the privileged access to the wounded privacies of many characters the striking
diversity of human beings across a relatively narrow canvas the shock waves as one generation
heaves like tectonic plates against another the secrets and lapses and repressions at once
intimate and historical the power indeed of an investigation that is always political and
always intimate―here is the novel being supremely itself proving itself up to the job by
changing not its terms of employment but the shape of the task." THE NEW YORKER
"Breathtaking. The tale is replete with history poetry and philosophy but also slavery
broken marriages passion and not-so-secret lovers." THE ATLANTIC
