Literary places in al-Awafi

Celestial Bodies

Jokha Alharthi

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.

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