**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.
