Silken Gazelles
About this ebook
In their small, mountainside village, Ghazaala and Asiya love each other like sisters, until tragedy strikes, and Asiya is forced into exile. Ghazaala is haunted by Asiya’s absence; a wound that never quite heals.
When Ghazaala falls in love with a handsome violinist, everything changes. In Muscat, she tries desperately to balance university and the demands of a new wife. Then she meets Harir, whose life, unbeknownst to Ghaazala, has also been changed by Asiya and the mystery of her fate.
Silken Gazelles is a tribute to the power of friendship and the strength of women, intertwining love and loss with deft, beautiful prose.
'A “remarkable” writer who has “constructed her own novelistic form”' The New Yorker
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
About the author
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.
