Silken Gazelles

Jokha Alharthi is the author of ten works, including three collections of short fiction, two children’s books, 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. Celestial Bodies was shortlisted for the Sahikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her 2016 novel Narinjah won the Sultan Qaboos Award for culture, art and literature. Her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean and Serbian.MARILYN BOOTH is Emerita Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Oxford University. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic. Recent titles include No Road to Paradise by Hassan Daoud, Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi, Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, and one of the first Arabic novels to be penned by a female author, Alice Butrus al-Bustani’s Sa’iba, forthcoming in Oxford World’s Classics. Her translation of Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies won the 2019 International Booker Prize.

Praise for Silken Gazelles 'A lush, shimmering portrait of a small community in the mountains of Oman, filled with women who love and care for one another, who fight for their dreams, and whose desire for independence and passion charts their course through the world far from their village . . . This book is transcendent’ – Susan Straight, author of Mecca and In the Country of Women ‘Through a touching, intricate narrative, Alharthi centres women’s relationships and inspects their elastic but fragile nature’ – Los Angeles Review of Books ‘A haunting love story’ - Booklist‘ International Booker Prize winner Alharthi’s eloquent latest . . . [is] a worthy entry into the pantheon of stories about female friendship’ – Publishers Weekly ‘Alharthi mines rich material with her details of Omani history . . . A book about searching for love – both parental and romantic – and reckoning with the past’ – Kirkus Reviews   Praise for Celestial Bodies ‘Bright and illuminating’ - Wall Street Journal ‘A treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets’ - The New York Times Book Review ‘The great pleasure of reading Celestial Bodies is witnessing a novel argue, through the achieved perfection of its form, for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct’ - New Yorker ‘Breathtaking, layered, multigenerational . . . 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’ - The Atlantic ‘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 encoun-tered a work of fiction in which form and idea were so inseparably, and appropriately, fused’ - New York Review of Books