Review by Booklist Review
Alharthi's third novel is her second to arrive in the U.S., again gorgeously rendered by Oxford professor Booth. Their auspicious earlier pairing produced Celestial Bodies (2019), making Alharthi the first female Omani author to be translated into English; the novel became the first written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. Here, Alharthi again showcases a puzzle-like narrative that eschews linearity, overlaps stories, and requires attentive commitment. At the center is Zuhour, a young Omani woman attending a British university, far from everything (and everyone) familiar. In breaking from home, at least for now, Zuhour is consumed by memories of her late grandmother, who raised three generations of Zuhour's family. Interwoven into Bint Aamir's life are the stories of the many others she unconditionally nurtured, including mothers who couldn't raise their sons, lost daughters, lovers carelessly denied. Thousands of miles away, Zuhour confronts "an agony of regret" for all the times she abandoned Bint Aamir, ignoring her desperate pleas of "Don't go." Drifting at school, Zuhour becomes entangled with two Pakistani sisters, the younger dismayed that the elder secretly married a man their privileged parents would immediately dismiss. In probing history, challenging social status, questioning familial bonds and debts, Alharthi's multilayered pages beautifully, achingly unveil the haunting aloneness of women's experiences.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) returns with a gorgeous and insightful story of longing. Zuhour, now at university in the U.K., spent her girlhood in a small Omani village, brought up mainly by a grandmotherly woman named Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour's grandfather Salman had charitably taken in years earlier. Bint Aamir raised Salman's son and, eventually, Zuhour, as Salman's wife was too mired in depression and obsessed with piety to take responsibility. Bint Aamir gradually lets go of her dreams for a plot of land to tend and a husband and children of her own, takes comfort drinking coffee in the shade of her beloved bitter orange tree, and dies just before Zuhour leaves for college. Away, Zuhour is troubled by unsettling dreams of Bint Aamir and tries to cope through therapy and friends such as the wealthy, sophisticated Pakistani sisters Suroor and Kuhl. The latter is married without the knowledge of her parents to Imran, a handsome fellow medical student of lowly, rural origins, and Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran form an exclusive triangle. Zuhour loves both, mainly the charming, taciturn Imran, whose humility, self-sacrifice, and agricultural roots inevitably remind her of Bint Aamir and the sense of belonging she misses so much. The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images symbolizing freedom struck down, such as a battered kite and a bird ripped to shreds. This solidifies Alharthi's well-earned literary reputation. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This latest from Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) is narrated by Zuhour, an Omani woman studying at a British university. Even as Zuhour struggles to fit into British society, her friend Kuhl enters into a secret marriage with Imran, a man of whom her family disapproves and with whom Zuhour is secretly in love. Much of the novel consists of stories about Zuhour's extended family. She is particularly haunted (somewhat literally) by her so-called grandmother Bint Aamir, who practically raised her. Bint Aamir is actually a relative taken in by Zuhour's grandfather after being thrown out of the house by her father's new wife. Never able to fulfill her own dreams or desires, she becomes de facto mother to two generations of Zuhour's family. This focus on family history reveals the limited options and opportunities of the women in Zuhour's life and the abuse and postpartum depression they endure, suggesting that Zuhour's guilt over leaving Bint Aamir behind comes from recognizing that she has managed to escape the fate of her grandmother, mother, and sister. Interestingly, readers never learn much about Zuhour herself. VERDICT Alharthi is an important new voice in world literature, and while Zuhour remains underdeveloped as a character, the novel is worth reading for the insights into Omani culture, particularly with regard to its exploration of family bonds and obligations, specifically women's plight in those dynamics.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Alharthi, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019), uses a dreamlike, nonlinear structure to show how the complications faced by a young Omani woman studying abroad merge with her remorse-filled memories of her very traditional surrogate grandmother. While Zuhour spends her days interacting with a coterie of international students at a university in a cold, unnamed English city, her nights are full of dreams concerning Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour calls grandmother although she was actually a distant relation. Brought into the family home by Zuhour's real grandparents, Bint Aamir helped raise Zuhour's father, Mansour, who was her great love, and then Zuhour and her siblings. Zuhour is haunted by regret that she never said a formal goodbye before she left Oman; Bint Aamir died soon after. Zuhour remembers Bint Aamir's hard, lonely life--she was abandoned in childhood, permanently blinded in one eye, her one possibility of marriage thwarted, living in constant service to others without family, land, or possessions of her own--in bits of memory that merge with Zuhour's own present life. So Zuhour's description of Bint Aamir's ruined eyesight slides into Zuhour's own "still misty and blurred" sight. In talking about her own life, Zuhour is not a fully trustworthy narrator; her feelings toward Bint Aamir and the past she envisions for the dead woman reflect her own confused emotions surrounding her Pakistani friend Kuhl. Kuhl is passionately involved with fellow medical student Imran, although her wealthy, cosmopolitan parents would never approve of the match because Imran comes from a family of peasant farmers. Zuhour likes to think of herself bonded with Kuhl and Imran, but it is not a neat triangle. Attracted to Imran and perhaps to Kuhl as well, Zuhour remains shut outside their love for each other. The parallel of Zuhour's and Bint Aamir's lonely outsider status echoes through Zuhour's never-ending dreams and thoughts. Nostalgia and longing conveyed through abstract metaphors and interior dialogue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
