liz's review
Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb
Really good, interesting, well-written novel that fluctuates between the childhood and adulthood of the narrator/protagonist, an English/Irish girl raised Muslim in Morocco and later Ethiopia. Her parents were hippie wanderers who left her at a retreat in Morocco before they went on a beach vacation, where they were killed. She's raised there for some time as a Muslim with Sufi influences, before she moves to Ethiopia, where the Islam is more orthodox and they still worship saints. The exploration between the two different kinds of Islam is extremely interesting. As an adult, she's living in public housing in London, working as a nurse and on the weekends volunteering to help Ethiopian refugees (this takes place in the 80s, during the huge famine/exodus). She's also holding out hope that she'll be reunited with the bourgeois med student she fell in love with before she left Ethiopia. The details are incredible, not least because it's grounded in such historical fact. I think the author...more
