Jokha Alharthi

The book that changed Jokha Alharthi’s life was born of stress, said Aida Edemariam in TheGuardian.com. A decade ago, the Omani novelist was a Ph.D. student far from home, living in a week-to-week rental in Edinburgh and learning to write academic papers in English while caring for her 8-month-old daughter. “I just came back to the flat one night and got the baby to sleep, and just sat there with my laptop,” she says. “And because I love my language so much, I felt the need to write in my own language. So I just started writing.” The result, published in the U.K. last year as Celestial Bodies, became the first novel written by an Omani woman to be published in English, and this spring became the first book written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. The U.S. edition has just arrived. “Books are like people,” Alharthi says. “Some have lucky lives.”

Alharthi seems to take most of her accomplishments in stride, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman. But Celestial Bodies captures a lot of history as it tells the story of three Omani sisters while reaching one generation back and one forward. Slavery didn’t end in Oman until

1970, and the country’s first university—where the 41-yearold Alharthi now teaches— didn’t open until she was 8. “I didn’t try to document the change intentionally,” she says. Yet the cultural shifts of the past 30 years, in a country still ruled by an absolute monarch, would have been hard to omit. And to think: The whole story began in homesickness. “It was like going back to my mother’s womb,” Alharthi says. “I don’t want to say it saved me, it’s a big word— but kind of.”