Bitter Orange Tree
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
A TIME Best Book of the Year
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
An extraordinary novel from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author that follows one young Omani woman as she builds a life for herself in Britain and reflects on the relationships that have made her from a “remarkable” writer who has “constructed her own novelistic form” (James Wood, The New Yorker).
From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish.
Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can’t help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Amir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhour left the Arabian Peninsula.
As the historical narrative of Bint Amir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhour’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips and dreams mingle with memories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) returns with a gorgeous and insightful story of longing. Zuhour, now at university in the U.K., spent her girlhood in a small Omani village, brought up mainly by a grandmotherly woman named Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour's grandfather Salman had charitably taken in years earlier. Bint Aamir raised Salman's son and, eventually, Zuhour, as Salman's wife was too mired in depression and obsessed with piety to take responsibility. Bint Aamir gradually lets go of her dreams for a plot of land to tend and a husband and children of her own, takes comfort drinking coffee in the shade of her beloved bitter orange tree, and dies just before Zuhour leaves for college. Away, Zuhour is troubled by unsettling dreams of Bint Aamir and tries to cope through therapy and friends such as the wealthy, sophisticated Pakistani sisters Suroor and Kuhl. The latter is married without the knowledge of her parents to Imran, a handsome fellow medical student of lowly, rural origins, and Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran form an exclusive triangle. Zuhour loves both, mainly the charming, taciturn Imran, whose humility, self-sacrifice, and agricultural roots inevitably remind her of Bint Aamir and the sense of belonging she misses so much. The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images symbolizing freedom struck down, such as a battered kite and a bird ripped to shreds. This solidifies Alharthi's well-earned literary reputation.
