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