Celestial Bodies

Through three sisters of the village of al-Awafi in the interior of Oman, Alharthi traces a country moving in a single lifetime from a slave-owning, date-farming past into oil modernity. The world of the book is the interior: the village and its date plantations and irrigation channels, the desert around it, and the merchant households; beyond it lie the capital Muscat, where the new Oman is made, and Zanzibar, from which the enslaved were once carried across the sea.

Mayya

Al-Awafi (the village)

The sisters

In al-Awafi the eldest sister Mayya sews at her machine and, without a word, marries the merchant's son Abdallah, one of the countless quiet accommodations the book anatomises. The village, with its houses, its gossip and its rigid order of family and rank, is the small world through which a whole nation's transformation is felt.

The village chapters

inspired by The village of al-Awafi is invented but drawn from the interior of Oman around Nizwa; it is the home of the three sisters and the fixed centre of the novel, sited in that real inland region.

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