Honey Hunger - Hardcover

by Zahran Alqasmi (Author), Marilyn Booth (Translator)

A breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hope, written by an International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning author and an International Booker-prize winning translator

Azzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching for wild hives, he encounters Thamna, a lone shepherd woman, on a mountain slope and is captivated by her and her honey-colored eyes.

Across the breathtaking vistas of Oman's remote mountains and plains, Azzan's troubled past and present unfold. A disappointment to his family, he turns to drink, and ultimately discovers the healing power of his beekeeping, before an accident in which he loses all.

Zahran Alqasmi's masterful novel thrums forward with a subtle momentum. His lucid, poetic writing conveys a visceral sense of time and place, of the fragile ecologies inhabited by both bees and humans alike, in this intense and compelling novel of loss and hope.

Author Biography

Zahran Alqasmi (Author) is an Omani poet and novelist, born in the Sultanate of Oman in 1974. Honey Hunger was his third of four published novels, and in 2023 he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for The Water Diviner. He has also published ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.

Marilyn Booth (Translated by) is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi include Bitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat and The Open Door (Hoopoe) by Latifa Al-Zayyat, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, among other books.