The eagerly awaited new novel by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, Narinjah (The Bitter Orange Tree) is an extraordinary tale of one young Omani woman building a life for herself in Britain and reflecting on the relationships that have made her.
Zuhur, 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 Zuhur left the Arabian Peninsula.
As the historical narrative of Bint Amir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhur’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips and dreams mingle with memories.
Narinjah (The 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.

JOKHA ALHARTHI is the first Omani woman to have a novel translated into English. Her previous novel, Celestial Bodies, was the first book translated from the Arabic to win the International Booker Prize (formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize). Alharthi is the author of three previous collections of short fiction, three children’s books, and three novels in Arabic. Narinjah (The Bitter Orange Tree) received the Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Art, and Literature. She completed a Ph.D. in Classical Arabic poetry in Edinburgh and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat.

Jokha Alharthi's profile page

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

Marilyn Booth's profile page

At once epic and ordinary: [The Bitter Orange Tree ] recalls harrowing tragedies and petty family squabbles, chaste romances and epochal cultural shifts brought on by international wars. … Alharthi’s prose, which was translated from Arabic into English by Marilyn Booth, is at once stark and breathtakingly descriptive.

TIME

[Narinjah] offers plenty of detail about Omani life between world wars. ... It makes for evocative reading, helped by Booth’s translation. ... In Alharthi’s world, it’s not only the future that holds promise; the past has possibility and opportunities for revision, too.

New York Times

As with her acclaimed novel Celestial Bodies, Alharthi probes family relationships and picks at the frayed edges where the heart and society want different things. . . . Alharthi describes the Omani community and the family compound with sharp details, but her best renderings are of the characters’ interior lives.

Hadara

A gorgeous and insightful story of longing … The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images … This solidifies Alharthi’s well-earned literary reputation.

Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Tender, gentle, and melancholic, Jokha Alharthi’s Narinjah: The Bitter Orange Tree is a testament to the ways in which the lives of young women are dictated by generations before them. ... A touching read for immigrants living away from their homelands, or folks rekindling family ties, Narinjah is recommended for those looking to explore the ways in which ancestry impacts our lives, even today.

Room Magazine

In this novel of remembrance and regret, Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, obsessed with the possibility of 'regaining or restoring just one moment from the past,' reflects on her grandmother, who has recently died . . . Much of the grandmother’s life story takes place in the context of devastating waves of drought, inflation, and famine, and Alharthi marshals these elements to construct a mosaic of history with women’s crushing vulnerability at its center.

The New Yorker

Alharthi delivers an imaginative story. ... The slim novel is a bittersweet, non-linear exploration of social status and a young woman’s agency.

TIME

In this lyrical follow-up to her Man Booker International prize–winning novel, Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi explores love, desire and language through three generations of an Omani family. These stories ... so beautifully imbued with elements of Oman’s landscape and culture, present as myths, allowing Alharthi to demonstrate her literary flair and ponder the qualities of their composite parts, namely language. ... What can challenge the terrible power of language? Alharthi shows that desire — an emotion so intense that it cannot be put into words — is a strong contender.

Asian Review of Books