{"product_id":"celestial-bodies-isbn-9781948226943","title":"Celestial Bodies","description":"\u003cb\u003eThis winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is “an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets\" (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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, \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.\u003cb\u003eWinner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e Editor’s Choice\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e Best Book of the Year in Fiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In her novel \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e, the Omani author Jokha Alharthi inhabits this liminal space between memory and forgetting: the dark tension between the stories we tell and the stories we know . . . Booth’s translation honors the elliptical rhythms of Arabic and the language’s rich literary heritage. She imbues the book’s numerous poetic extracts with lyricism and devotedly preserves the rhymes and cadences of its proverbs. ('The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache.') Yet there is no doubt that this is a contemporary novel, insistent and alive . . . \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets.\" ―Beejay Silcox, T\u003ci\u003ehe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bright and illuminating.\" ―Sam Sacks, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The form’s remarkable adaptability is on brilliant display in \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies \u003c\/i\u003e(Catapult), a searching work of fiction by Jokha Alharthi, an Omani writer and academic . . . Within all the chapters, the stories float like this, lightly tethered to what the French call récit―the moment in which the story is being told, the narrative present. The result is a beautifully wavering, always mobile set of temporalities, the way starlight seems to flicker when we gaze at distant and nearer celestial bodies . . . Indeed, the great pleasure of reading \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is witnessing a novel argue, through the achieved perfection of its form, for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct.\" ―James Wood, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Arab women, therefore, face twin obstacles: the West’s own gender biases, and the reductive narrative of the Arab woman. This is why it was such a victory when the International Booker Prize jury chose an Arab novel―one written by a woman―to receive the award for the first time in the prize’s history. The Omani novelist Jokha al-Harthi’s breathtaking, layered, multigenerational novel \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e, which was beautifully translated into English, follows the lives of three sisters from a small village at a time of rapid social and economic change in Oman. The tale is replete with history, poetry, and philosophy, but also slavery, broken marriages, passion, and not-so-secret lovers.\" ―Kim Gattas, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Rich, dense . . . The variety of perspectives is effective in offering a window into a country that few Western readers will know intimately . . . \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies \u003c\/i\u003eis strongest in its exploration of how the changes in Oman affect women: within one generation, they are exposed to ideas from abroad and start moving away from cloistered, rural life. But Alharthi . . . pushes past stereotypical narratives of Muslim women defying patriarchy, instead illustrating the difficulties of balancing tradition and newfound freedoms. It’s a tale that perhaps could have been written only in a strange new place itself.\" ―Naina Bajekal, \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A rich, dense web of a novel . . . Alharthi constructs a tapestry of interlocking lives, some seen over the course of decades, others at just a single pungent moment. Rarely have I encountered a work of fiction in which form and idea were so inseparably, and appropriately, fused . . . Marilyn Booth, the translator, has done a wonderful job of conveying a lyricism I can only assume is present in Alharthi’s original.\" —Ruth Franklin, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJokha Alharthi\u003c\/b\u003e is the first Omani woman to have a novel translated into English, and \u003ci\u003eCelestial Bodies\u003c\/i\u003e is the first book translated from Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. She is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children’s book, and three novels in Arabic. Fluent in English, she completed a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh, and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She has been shortlisted for the Sahikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean, and Serbian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMarilyn Booth\u003c\/b\u003e holds the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently \u003ci\u003eThe Penguin’s Song\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNo Road to Paradise\u003c\/i\u003e, both by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud.","brand":"Catapult","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305181597925,"sku":"NP9781948226943","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781948226943.jpg?v=1767723515","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/celestial-bodies-isbn-9781948226943","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}