Celestial Bodies

Three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi take different routes out of the same constrained world: one marries for love, one marries because she is told to, one refuses. Alharthi moves between their generations and the household’s slave-owning past, which Oman abolished only in 1970 and which the family has agreed not to discuss. It became the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the International Booker Prize, in Marilyn Booth’s translation.