Celestial Bodies

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2019

‘A beautiful book, which teaches us a great deal about the swiftly changing relations between men and women and between the generations.’ TLS

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 beautifully written, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s loves and losses.
 

PRAISE FOR CELESTIAL BODIES

‘Pushes past stereotypical narratives of Muslim women defying patriarchy.’ TIME

‘Brings a distinctive and important new voice to world literature.’ Irish Times

‘Fascinating.’ Guardian

‘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

'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.’Atlantic