Bøker av Jokha Alharthi

Celestial Bodies is the International Booker-winning and internationally bestselling novel from Jokha Alharthi.  Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves.   PRAISE FOR CELESTIAL BODIES "An innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets” 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. The ability to move freely through time, the privileged access to the wounded privacies of many characters, the striking diversity of human beings across a relatively narrow canvas, the shock waves as one generation heaves, like tectonic plates, against another, the secrets and lapses and repressions, at once intimate and historical, the power, indeed, of an investigation that is always political and always intimate―here is the novel being supremely itself, proving itself up to the job by changing not its terms of employment but the shape of the task." THE NEW YORKER "Breathtaking. The tale is replete with history, poetry, and philosophy, but also slavery, broken marriages, passion, and not-so-secret lovers." THE ATLANTIC

The new novel from the first Arabic-language winner of the Booker International Prize. 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

A radical re-interpretation of the nature of medieval Arabic love poetry in the classical age This book examines in detail the concept of the body in Arabic love poetry in the 'Udhri tradition. Avoiding familiar clichés about the purity of love in 'Udhri poetry - broadly speaking, an Arabic counterpart to the western medieval concept of unconsummated courtly love - it instead questions the traditional much-vaunted emphasis on chastity and the assumption that this poetry omits any concept of the body. Challenging this view, Jokha Alharthi re-appraises the relationship between love, poetry and Arab society in the 8th to 11th centuries. She focuses on the key differences between what the poetry itself says and the views of later sources about 'Udhri poets and their works. She also documents how the representation of the beloved in the 'Udhri ghazal was influenced by pre-Islamic poetry, showing how this tradition developed, with a series of overlapping historical layers. And she breaks new ground by examining how this poetry treats not only the body of the beloved but also that of her lover, the poet himself. Key Features  Challenges the stereotypical idea about the absence of the body in 'Udhri love poetry  Investigates the 'Udhri tradition through close readings of the classical 10th-century Arabic sources including anthologies such as the Kitab al-Aghani  Contributes to literary studies on the representations of the body  Includes close readings of difficult literary texts in classical Arabic including the work of 'Urwah b. Hizam, Majnun Layla, Qays b. Dharih, Jamil Buthaynah and Kuthayyir 'Azzah Jokha Alharthi is Associate Professor of Classical Arabic Literature at the Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat. She obtained her PhD in classical Arabic literature from the University of Edinburgh. She is the winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019 for her novel Celestial Bodies (Sayyidat al-Qamar). To date, translation rights in the novel have been sold in 21 languages.