Books from Oman

Bahari takes its title from the Swahili word for ocean, a fitting name for a cookbook centered on Oman, a country whose food culture has been shaped by centuries of coastal trade. Author Dina Macki, a British-born chef of Omani and Zanzibari heritage, presents the book as the first Omani cookbook written by an Omani chef. The collection holds more than ninety recipes covering meat, fish, vegetables, breads, dips, desserts, and drinks, drawn from traditions that reflect connections to Pakistan, Iran, India, the Swahili coast, and Portugal.

Macki structures the book around her own travels across Oman and Zanzibar, tracing regional dishes and the ingredients behind them. Alongside the recipes, she includes essays on identity and food history, exploring how particular dishes and flavors link people to their communities and ancestry. The writing addresses both the practical details of preparing Omani food at home and the broader patterns of trade and migration that brought specific spices, techniques, and crops to the region.

Oman's long Indian Ocean coastline runs from the Strait of Hormuz in the north to the border with Yemen in the south. That geography made Omani ports important stops on maritime routes for centuries, and the cookbook treats this history as inseparable from the cuisine it documents.

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Celestial Bodies follows three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi, each navigating marriage and desire along different paths. Mayya enters marriage after recovering from earlier heartbreak. Asma agrees to marry out of obligation. Khawla turns down every suitor, holding out for the man she loves, who has left for Canada. Their choices unfold across several decades as Oman itself undergoes deep structural change.

The novel maps the social layers of a country moving from older hierarchies, including the legacy of slavery, toward the pressures and possibilities of new wealth. Families at every economic level appear in the story, and the domestic details of al-Awafi become a way of tracing larger shifts in Omani life. Alharthi writes from within these households rather than from a historical distance, so the political and economic transformations register through personal relationships, silences, and daily decisions.

Jokha Alharthi is a writer from Oman, and Celestial Bodies was the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. It was also the first book by an Omani woman author to appear in English translation.

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Twenty-year-old Haneen returns to Egypt after fifteen years away, most of them spent at a boarding school in Paris. She has had almost no contact with her family during that time, apart from occasional visits from her father, Rami. Now summoned back by Rami's twin sister, Haneen receives an envelope containing his personal diaries. The final section of the diaries is missing.

As Haneen reads through her father's writings, she encounters accounts of intense love affairs and restless spiritual searching from his younger years. The diary entries gradually expose the outlines of a family she has barely known, and the missing pages raise their own questions. The novel is structured around multiple voices belonging to a circle of close friends, each contributing fragments of memory and perspective that span a full generation.

Ibrahim Farghali compresses this wide arc of time and experience into a compact, layered narrative. The story moves between Cairo and Paris, between past and present, and between the written record Rami left behind and the gaps where it falls silent. Haneen's attempt to piece together her family history drives the book forward, but the overlapping voices ensure that no single account holds the complete picture.

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Aref is a young boy living in Oman who learns that his family will soon move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents plan to attend graduate school. He does not want to go. He does not want to leave his school, his friends, or his grandfather, Sidi. When his mother asks him to pack his suitcase, he refuses. She turns to Sidi for help, but instead of persuading the boy to pack, Sidi takes him on a series of outings across the country.

Together they camp under open skies deep in the desert, sleep on Sidi's rooftop, fish in the Gulf of Oman, and visit a nature reserve where sea turtles come ashore. At each place, Sidi quietly collects a small stone that he later tucks into Aref's suitcase, giving the boy physical reminders of home to carry with him. The story follows the days before departure rather than the move itself, grounding its tension in the ordinary difficulty of saying goodbye to a landscape and a person you love.

Naomi Shihab Nye sets the book firmly in Oman's geography, from its desert interior to its coastline. The novel received a 2015 Middle East Book Award and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.

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