Celestial Bodies

A tapestry of love and family dynamics, set in Oman, across several generations. It's a great portrait of a changing Omani culture over the last 100 years. From slavetrade, to date farms, to praying to jinns, arranged marriages, to Western interest and development of the oil industry. Woven into this are family secrets, disappearing mothers, a bedouin lover, husbands with lives abroad, sisters with opposing pragmatic and romantic visions of love.

We follow multiple perspectives from multiple families, jumping back and forth in time. Listening to this on audio, made it hard to track who is who. Until i got a hold of the family tree from the print edition, and stared at it about once per chapter, I felt quite lost. It's absolutely also possible just to immerse oneself in the flow of stories, but I always feel more at ease if I can track my characters.

Well-told and an interesting window into a culture, but I'd always prefer focused stories to tapestries.