SILKEN GAZELLES

The latest novel from Alharthi—winner of the International Booker Prize for Celestial Bodies (2019)—explores the lives of three Omani women.

The story starts with a nursing mother literally dropping her infant daughter in a moment of shock and grief. The baby is rescued by another villager, Saada, who nurses her with her own daughter, Asiya. Called Ghazaala, or Gazelle, the baby grows up as Asiya’s “milk-sister,” always preferring her foster mother Saada’s household over her own. Then a twofold tragedy strikes, rendering Asiya motherless; she departs the village without saying goodbye, disappearing from Ghazaala’s life. As in the justly celebrated and more ambitious Celestial Bodies, Alharthi employs a circular, layered approach to storytelling. The narrative moves forward and backward in time, sometimes dizzyingly, and covers the lives of many characters. Much of the book is in third person, though one thread is narrated by Ghazaala’s university friend Harir. Obsessed by the memory of a mysterious girl who was briefly her neighbor, Harir unwittingly comes into possession of the truth about the tragedy still haunting Ghazaala. Alharthi mines rich material with her details of Omani history, like the country’s system of ancient canals and the fortunes once made in pearls; Asiya’s drunkard father tells the girls about ghosts in the abandoned mansions of former pearl magnates: “the divers whose lungs had exploded in the depths of the Gulf...the boat captains who’d been weighed down by debt...the English consul, wearing his dust-laden chest medals...the slaves whose backs had been broken by the heft of the pearl caskets.” Other sections are less compelling, like Ghazaala’s unhappy pursuit of men who remain unavailable and opaque.

A book about searching for love—both parental and romantic—and reckoning with the past.