I am not entirely sure what I just read. Celestial Bodies is vastly different from my normal reading fare, and I don’t know that I really understood it. It’s densely populated with characters, time jumps back and forth, and the story of this one family gets woven against the backdrop of a changing Oman and the tensions between tradition and modernity. 

From the back cover, it seems like the story will focus on the three sisters, Mayya, Asma, and Khawla. And that’s where it starts – with the man Mayya loves never acknowledging her, her marriage to someone else, and the birth of her first child, a daughter she names London. But then it branches off to follow other people at other points in time. 

Mayya’s husband Abdullah is the only one to narrate in first person as he reminisces about his childhood with his nursemaid and his abusive father, his marriage with Mayya, and their children, and interacts with his daughter London as an adult. The rest of the story is told omnisciently, with third-person narration seamlessly slipping between Khawla, Asma, the three sisters’ mother and father, Abdullah’s nursemaid, London as an adult, and many other more minor characters (including Asma’s husband, Abdullah’s nursemaid’s mother, and Mayya’s father’s lover) that provide history and context to this family’s saga. 

Time is a fluid thing here. The story slips seamlessly between what I’m calling the “present” – the time where Mayya has just given birth to London and Asma and Khawla are getting ready to be married – and the past and the future. It delves into childhoods of parents and grandparents, then slides ahead to decades beyond the “present.” There are no temporal anchors here, and I’m only calling one part of the story as the “present” because that’s where the book opened. 

I wanted to categorize this as magical realism, because it has a strong magical realism feel, but there is no magic in this story and nothing supernatural besides traditional superstitions. The audiobook is only 8 hours and per the StoryGraph it’s 250 pages in print, but Celestial Bodies somehow feels like a sweeping family saga anyway. There isn’t a plot, just life, the tangled timelines illustrating the interconnectedness of family and how past influences present influences future. 

I am not sure I understand this book. It packs more into its 250 pages than should be possible, and balances such a massive cast of characters that it did get a little confusing at times. But it’s deftly woven and somehow kept my interest despite a complete lack of plot in the usual sense. I absolutely see how it won its awards.