Sweetness In The Belly
  • Published: 31 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781407020440
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

Sweetness In The Belly

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Aug 2011
Paperback
1 Dec 2006
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

'A wonderful feat of imagination and empathy. I had to suppress bitter feelings of literary envy, even as I couldn't stop devouring it' - Louis de Bernieres

A richly imagined tale of one woman's search for love and belonging.

In Thatcher's London, Lilly, a white Muslim nurse, struggles in a state of invisible exile. As Ethiopian refugees gradually fill the flats of the housing estate where she lives, Lilly tentatively begins to share with them her longing for the home she herself once had in Africa and her heartbreaking search for her missing lover.

Back in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, the young Lilly, born in the 1950s to British parents, now orphaned and full of religious conviction, finds herself living in the city of Harar. She is drawn to the idealistic young doctor, Aziz, himself an outsider in the community. But then convulsions of a new revolutionary order separate them, sending Lilly to an England she has never seen, while Aziz disappears.
  • Published: 31 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781407020440
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Camilla Gibb

Camilla Gibb is the author of Mouthing the Words and The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life. She was one of the 21 young women writers included in the Orange Futures list of writers to watch in the 21st century.

portrait photo of Camilla Gibb

Also by Camilla Gibb

The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life
Mouthing The Words
See all

Praise for Sweetness In The Belly

Sweetness In The Belly is remarkable for its geographic, thematic and historic amplitude and breadth, depicting the multi-cultural and modern world. Gibb...is certainly one to watch.

Birmingham Post

A passionate and humane story about people for whom displacement, poverty and war are everyday trials...Gibb, singled out as one of the Orange Futures writers, is one to watch

Sheila Hamilton, Glasgow Evening Times

Camilla Gibb....burrows deep into the lives of her characters, finding the universal in the exotic

Kate Saunders, The Times

Gibb's understanding of this world seems almost uncanny but it is her compassion for her characters that impressed me the most. [Sweetness in the Belly] challenges and disturbs as it enlightens and uplifts. A really exceptional achievement

Barbara Gowdy

This is a profound novel, exploring themes of female circumcision, politics, war, tribalism, yet it is also an exquisite homage to Islam

Bernardine Evaristo, Guardian

This is a rarity, a novel that transforms expectations. A hugely ambitious work executed with deceptive ease, it is an unbelievably odd tale, yet utterly convincing, able to transport us behind closed borders and back again. . . Succeeds brilliantly . . . A marvellous sight to behold' Montreal Gazette