It's that season now when my mind turns toward piecing together "best of"

lists in all manner of categories: the best history I've read this year, the best current-events titles, the best children's books, and on and on. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we sealed up all our summer garden vegetables in pressure-cooked Mason jars and heavy zip-bags that we loaded into the basement freezer. November still begins the months of digging into reserves—whether books or string beans—and bringing out the choice morsels to share with company.

In any year, one of the most fondly remembered feasts, the richest and the most filling, is the novel—the one, the sweet read that sticks to your ribs and somehow manages to be soup and meat and dessert all together. Weeks and even months later, you still feel the warmth and weight of it. This year, for me, that book is Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly. I've taken to calling it "the new Kite Runner" because the two books are tasty in many similar ways: they both bring home a distant country and make it familiar while keeping intact its vibrant, arresting differences.

Gibb was born in England and is based in Toronto, but she sets her book mostly in the crooked corner of Africa; it takes place in Ethiopia in the early 1970s, during that country's last days as a monarchy. Politics and the windstorm of communist revolution blow in the background, but the main story is actually quite small, quite personal: it's the story of Lilly, a young woman whose British-Irish parents were hippies who went to Northern Africa in the 1960s to loose their clothes and their inhibitions and who ended up loosing their lives and their daughter as well.

Lilly was taken in at a Moroccan shrine by a Sufi holy man, a Muslim mystic who raised her to study Koran, to love God (the merciful, the compassionate) and to look deep into the world for the hidden meanings of things. (As she says, her mother taught her where babies came from; the Great Abdal taught her where they go when they die.) Her contemplative life is eventually ended, though, by political upheaval, and Lilly flees as a teenager—making a pilgrimage of sorts—to the walled Ethiopian town of Harrar.

It's there, in that city of saints—old Muslim saints in a country intently pursuing Christian ways and modern life, that Lilly becomes an adult. She lives in dusty slums amid the lower tiers of Harrar's many hierarchies: owners over farmers, Arabs over blacks, holy men over the poor and broken, Christians above all the rest. As a white Muslim woman and a foreigner, Lilly has no simple place there. In time, though, she carves one out by becoming a teacher and instructing destitute children in the subject that occupied her own youthful days: she teaches them to read Koran.

It's from this remarkable set-up that Gibb fashions a novel that's both boldly exotic and quietly, even humbly, affecting. She shows us how Lilly adapts to Ethiopia, to a parched land abloom with coffee and qat—a stimulating herb chewed for prayer and euphoria—and how she adapts again a decade later to the chilly grey reserve of London, where she has fled as a refugee. Between these two poles of life come all the difficulties of living in interesting places during trying times.

Sweetness in the Belly isn't a coming-of-age story; rather, like Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, it's a story that throws childhood and adulthood into sharp relief by contrasting the easy beliefs of one with the difficult choices of the other. Lilly is devout and serious in a way that often seems at odds with our modern world, and as she encounters the hard realities of poverty, of blind superstition, of love and greed and the scars made when countries burn and families tear apart, she tests her faith against her experiences in ways that surprise and captivate. She shows us a side of Islam—a pious, reflective aspect—currently in short supply on the nightly news, and the novel breathes with her insight.

Just as she struggled to find a place for herself as a young woman in Harrar, Lilly scrambles again to create a niche as a nurse and a refugee in England: she is African, she is European, Muslim and Western, a fish swimming in currents both familiar and strange. Having lost so many she had come to care for—her students, a surrogate mother, the man who introduced her to politics and physical affection, she pushes people away, insisting they're "trying to find a way into a life that has no door." But it's beneath the iron skies of London that Lilly's story, and my favorite novel of the year, comes full circle. Surrounded by memories, by new children and fellow survivors, she begins to recapture the flavor she first knew years before in the city of saints: she once again feels sweetness in the belly, and it's the very taste of beautiful, evocative, year's-best fiction.

Review by Mark David Bradshaw, November 9, 2006

Read a review of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini:

http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0404-010.html