Celestial Bodies

Mayya, Asma, and Khawla each negotiate the same narrowing set of options differently. Mayya marries Abdallah without love, absorbed instead in the sewing machine that gives her something of her own, and names her first daughter London after nothing more than the sound of the word. Asma marries out of calculation, treating the wedding as a door out of a suffocating household rather than a romance. Khawla refuses every suitor her family produces, waiting years for a cousin who emigrated to Canada and barely writes back. Alharthi lets all three count as forms of agency and constraint at once, none of them clean escapes.

Running underneath the sisters' story is Zarifa, once enslaved in the household and, even after Oman's formal abolition of slavery in 1970, still bound to it by something the family never quite calls debt and never quite calls love. Her son occupies a status the novel refuses to simplify, freeborn on paper and unequal in practice, and Alharthi uses that lingering asymmetry to insist abolition was a date on a law, not an ending.

The novel's chapters skip between narrators and decades without signposting, anchored only by Abdallah's first-person sections, narrated mid-flight to Frankfurt, which return obsessively to his father Sulayman's dealings and his own uneasy fatherhood. That structure enacts, formally, the same compression the book describes historically: a society that moved from camel caravans and household slavery to oil wealth and international flights within a single lifetime, with no interval long enough to properly absorb the distance travelled.

Zarifa's position in the household after manumission looks, on the surface, like belonging: she runs the kitchen, raises the children, is scolded and confided in like family. Alharthi keeps returning to the smaller marks of what that belonging actually costs, whose name appears on which document, whose marriage is arranged by whom, whose grief is allowed to interrupt the household's routine and whose is expected to serve it. The novel's argument is not that slavery persisted after 1970 in name, but that its habits of ownership survived quietly inside the very intimacy that was supposed to have replaced it.

Every one of Abdallah's chapters is narrated from the same cramped airplane seat, memory arriving in no particular order as the plane crosses one time zone after another. Alharthi never lets him land inside his own narration, so his reckoning with his father's history and his own failures as a husband and parent stays permanently mid-transit, unresolved by the time the aircraft, and the novel, eventually touches down. The device denies the reader the comfort of a single vantage point from which the family's whole story finally makes sense.