Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

In Harar, Lilly earns her keep by helping with the household chores and teaching local children the Qur'an. Ignoring the cries of "farenji" (foreigner), she slowly begins to put down roots, learning the language and immersing herself in a culture rich in customs and rituals and lush with glittering bright headscarves, the chorus of muezzins and the scent of incense and coffee. She is drawn to an idealistic half-Sudanese doctor named Aziz, and the two begin to meet every Saturday at a social gathering. As they stay behind to talk, Lilly finds her faith tested for the first time in her life: "The desire to remain in his company overwhelmed common sense; I would pick up my good Muslim self on the way home." Just as their love begins to blossom, they are wrenched apart when the aging emperor Haile Selassie is deposed by the brutal Dergue regime. Lilly seeks exile in London, while Aziz stays to pursue his revolutionary passions.

In London, Lilly's life as a white Muslim is no less complicated. A hospital staff nurse, she befriends a refugee from Ethiopia named Amina, whose daughter she helped to deliver in a back alley. The two women set up a community association to re-unite refugees with lost family members. Their work, however, isn't entirely altruistic. Both women are looking for someone: Amina, her husband, Yusuf, and Lilly, Aziz, who remains firmly, painfully, implanted in her heart.

The first-person narrative alternates seamlessly between England (1981-91) and Ethiopia (1970-74), weaving a rich tapestry of one woman's quest to maintain faith and love through revolution, upheaval and the alienation of life in exile.

Camilla Gibb was born in London, England, and grew up in Toronto. The first person in her family to earn a university degree, she holds a B.A. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. While researching her thesis, she spent a year living with a family in the ancient walled city of Harar, Ethiopia.
After returning to Canada, Gibb spent two years at the University of Toronto as a post-doctoral research fellow. She probably would have continued in academia were it not for a chance encounter that enabled her to pursue her longtime dream of writing fiction. One day, a friend of a colleague caught her moping on a bench. After hearing about her frustrated desire to be a full-time writer, the man asked how much she needed to support herself while working on her first novel. The next week he showed up with the amount she had quoted: $6000. At first she refused, but he convinced her that it was just another form of scholarship, no strings attached. Gibb's brother lent her his trailer, where she wrote on a laptop plugged into a small stove. Mouthing the Words, which poured out of her in just eight weeks, sold internationally and won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000. Her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life, was also published to great acclaim around the world and was selected by The Globe and Mail as one of the Best Books of the Year. In 2002, Gibb was named by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.
Gibb's third best-selling novel, Sweetness in the Belly, was shortlisted for the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Gibb explains that she experienced two major challenges in writing this story. For one, she had to move beyond her thesis, which she describes in a Toronto Star interview as "this dry, boring thing with all the blood and the life sucked out of it." She adds: "Everything that had moved me had been expunged - all the intimacies and the relationships that I longed to write about." She was also forced do a major rewrite when she turned the main character from a child into an adult. Of the 400 pages she originally submitted to her editor only five made the final cut. "I was relying on the charm and naïveté of a child," she said in an interview with The Ottawa Citizen. "But at some stage I knew I had to grow up as a writer, and my characters have to grow up too. Added to that was more responsibility - I had to take a stance, have an opinion, be informed."
Camilla Gibb lives in Toronto, where she serves as Vice President of PEN Canada and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a new novel about a community bound and defined by an unnamed illness that is stigmatized, feared, and misunderstood, and how the outside world responds to the perceived threat of an epidemic of unknown origin

AWARDS

NOMINEE - Scotiabank Giller Prize
WINNER 2006 - Trillium Book Award