Narrator Raghad Chaar’s performance of this audiobook is mesmerizing. She narrates with music in her voice. Her delivery of the many Arabic words and passages intensifies this nonlinear work. Her deft pacing and cadence give form to the memories and experiences that create the plot. The novel ties together the past life of the solitary narrator, Zuhoor, a student at an unnamed English university, and the vivid remembrances of her grandmother, Beit Amin. The text leaps back and forth in time and location from England to Oman, with stops in Pakistan. The author, winner of the Man Booker Prize, writes lyrically about the lives of women and girls in traditional societies. The listener comes away bathed in the poetry. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

★ 03/07/2022

Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) returns with a gorgeous and insightful story of longing. Zuhour, now at university in the U.K., spent her girlhood in a small Omani village, brought up mainly by a grandmotherly woman named Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour’s grandfather Salman had charitably taken in years earlier. Bint Aamir raised Salman’s son and, eventually, Zuhour, as Salman’s wife was too mired in depression and obsessed with piety to take responsibility. Bint Aamir gradually lets go of her dreams for a plot of land to tend and a husband and children of her own, takes comfort drinking coffee in the shade of her beloved bitter orange tree, and dies just before Zuhour leaves for college. Away, Zuhour is troubled by unsettling dreams of Bint Aamir and tries to cope through therapy and friends such as the wealthy, sophisticated Pakistani sisters Suroor and Kuhl. The latter is married without the knowledge of her parents to Imran, a handsome fellow medical student of lowly, rural origins, and Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran form an exclusive triangle. Zuhour loves both, mainly the charming, taciturn Imran, whose humility, self-sacrifice, and agricultural roots inevitably remind her of Bint Aamir and the sense of belonging she misses so much. The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images symbolizing freedom struck down, such as a battered kite and a bird ripped to shreds. This solidifies Alharthi’s well-earned literary reputation. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (May)

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

A TIME Best Book of the Year
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
An Electric Literature Most Anticipated Title of the Year
A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"Evocative . . . In Alharthi’s world, it’s not only the future that holds promise; the past has possibility and opportunities for revision, too." —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

"[Alharthi] continues to demonstrate a deep sympathy for the ways women suffer and survive the vicissitudes of a society that gives them little agency. And fans will recognize Alharthi’s fluid treatment of chronology and setting, once again gorgeously translated by [Marilyn] Booth. Alharthi, who earned a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh and now teaches in Oman, can simultaneously emphasize the universality of her characters’ feelings and the unique cultural context of their experiences. Bitter Orange Tree is a story of mourning and alienation, and Alharthi has developed a tone that captures that sense of being suspended in the timelessness of grief." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Epic . . . Breathtakingly descriptive." —A TIME Best Book of the Year

"Alharthi keeps her reader emotionally invested in both women. She emphasizes their tight bond by switching between one character's past and the other's present and braiding together their experiences . . . An elegant meditation on remembering and forgetting." —Malcolm Forbes , Star Tribune

"In this novel of remembrance and regret, Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, obsessed with the possibility of 'regaining or restoring just one moment from the past,' reflects on her grandmother, who has recently died . . . Much of the grandmother’s life story takes place in the context of devastating waves of drought, inflation, and famine, and Alharthi marshals these elements to construct a mosaic of history with women’s crushing vulnerability at its center." —The New Yorker

"From the first Omani woman to have a novel translated into English, this remarkable novel centers the evolution of one woman’s agency, power and relationships." —Karla Strand, Ms.

"Alharthi probes family relationships and picks at the frayed edges where the heart and society want different things . . . [She] deftly describes the frustration of being between two cultures." —Catherine Bolgar, Hadara Magazine

"In a global literary landscape that has long centered on male authors working in English, Alharthi and Booth’s work with contemporary Arabophone literature feels daring and exciting." —Anna Learn, Electric Literature

"In probing history, challenging social status, questioning familial bonds and debts, Alharthi’s multilayered pages beautifully, achingly unveil the haunting aloneness of women’s experiences." —Booklist (starred review)

"A gorgeous and insightful story of longing . . . The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images . . . This solidifies Alharthi’s well-earned literary reputation." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Alharthi, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019), uses a dreamlike, nonlinear structure to show how the complications faced by a young Omani woman studying abroad merge with her remorse-filled memories of her very traditional surrogate grandmother." —Kirkus Reviews

"Bitter Orange Tree blazes with the strength of generations of Omani women—from the charcoal makers of the Arab gulf to the international students of a British residence hall. This mesmerizing novel is an illuminating, important work and Jokha Alharthi points her pen at some of the most harrowing circumstances facing women and girls across the world. I am grateful to Marilyn Booth for her translation of this exquisite book.” —Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina

"Jokha Alharthi is a remarkable writer for whom my admiration grows with each work. Watching the lives of Zuhour and Bint Amir unfurl within Bitter Orange Tree was a pleasure, and Alharthi's prose in the capable hands of translator Marilyn Booth is as clear and refreshing as a cool glass of water." —Sara Nović, author of America is Immigrants

"A rich and powerful novel that showcases the interplay between memory and emigration and the precariousness of sisterhood in a world that encourages the domination of men, told in a sumptuous and incisive translation by Marilyn Booth." —Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick and co-winner with Olga Tokarczuk of The International Booker Prize for Flights

"Lyrical, elegiac, and poignant, a transcending read—like sitting by an open window at dusk as memories slip in, one by one, each radiating with life." —Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods

Narrator Raghad Chaar's performance of this audiobook is mesmerizing. She narrates with music in her voice.

04/01/2022

This latest from Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) is narrated by Zuhour, an Omani woman studying at a British university. Even as Zuhour struggles to fit into British society, her friend Kuhl enters into a secret marriage with Imran, a man of whom her family disapproves and with whom Zuhour is secretly in love. Much of the novel consists of stories about Zuhour's extended family. She is particularly haunted (somewhat literally) by her so-called grandmother Bint Aamir, who practically raised her. Bint Aamir is actually a relative taken in by Zuhour's grandfather after being thrown out of the house by her father's new wife. Never able to fulfill her own dreams or desires, she becomes de facto mother to two generations of Zuhour's family. This focus on family history reveals the limited options and opportunities of the women in Zuhour's life and the abuse and postpartum depression they endure, suggesting that Zuhour's guilt over leaving Bint Aamir behind comes from recognizing that she has managed to escape the fate of her grandmother, mother, and sister. Interestingly, readers never learn much about Zuhour herself. VERDICT Alharthi is an important new voice in world literature, and while Zuhour remains underdeveloped as a character, the novel is worth reading for the insights into Omani culture, particularly with regard to its exploration of family bonds and obligations, specifically women's plight in those dynamics.—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Narrator Raghad Chaar’s performance of this audiobook is mesmerizing. She narrates with music in her voice. Her delivery of the many Arabic words and passages intensifies this nonlinear work. Her deft pacing and cadence give form to the memories and experiences that create the plot. The novel ties together the past life of the solitary narrator, Zuhoor, a student at an unnamed English university, and the vivid remembrances of her grandmother, Beit Amin. The text leaps back and forth in time and location from England to Oman, with stops in Pakistan. The author, winner of the Man Booker Prize, writes lyrically about the lives of women and girls in traditional societies. The listener comes away bathed in the poetry. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

2022-03-16
Alharthi, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019), uses a dreamlike, nonlinear structure to show how the complications faced by a young Omani woman studying abroad merge with her remorse-filled memories of her very traditional surrogate grandmother.

While Zuhour spends her days interacting with a coterie of international students at a university in a cold, unnamed English city, her nights are full of dreams concerning Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour calls grandmother although she was actually a distant relation. Brought into the family home by Zuhour’s real grandparents, Bint Aamir helped raise Zuhour’s father, Mansour, who was her great love, and then Zuhour and her siblings. Zuhour is haunted by regret that she never said a formal goodbye before she left Oman; Bint Aamir died soon after. Zuhour remembers Bint Aamir’s hard, lonely life—she was abandoned in childhood, permanently blinded in one eye, her one possibility of marriage thwarted, living in constant service to others without family, land, or possessions of her own—in bits of memory that merge with Zuhour’s own present life. So Zuhour’s description of Bint Aamir’s ruined eyesight slides into Zuhour’s own “still misty and blurred” sight. In talking about her own life, Zuhour is not a fully trustworthy narrator; her feelings toward Bint Aamir and the past she envisions for the dead woman reflect her own confused emotions surrounding her Pakistani friend Kuhl. Kuhl is passionately involved with fellow medical student Imran, although her wealthy, cosmopolitan parents would never approve of the match because Imran comes from a family of peasant farmers. Zuhour likes to think of herself bonded with Kuhl and Imran, but it is not a neat triangle. Attracted to Imran and perhaps to Kuhl as well, Zuhour remains shut outside their love for each other. The parallel of Zuhour’s and Bint Aamir’s lonely outsider status echoes through Zuhour’s never-ending dreams and thoughts.

Nostalgia and longing conveyed through abstract metaphors and interior dialogue.