“An evocative, unpredictable novel.”
— Words Without Borders

“Zahran Alqasmi portrays the inimitable lifeways deep in Oman’s mountainous interior as no other writer does. We can taste and smell the sweet pungency of the natural world that this powerful writing brings forth. In this exceptional narrative, hunger for honey portends hunger for the unknown: Alqasmi’s characters are ever on the move to discover who they are by means of searching for the ever-elusive mountain honey.”
— Jokha Alharthi, author of Celestial Bodies


“This captivating novel is a search for hope, longing, love. . . . [T]hose readers who enjoy lyrical books, as the author is also a poet, will be transported to a rich and vibrant world among the bees.”
— Tulsa Book Review

“This is a landscape novel that seems to sit outside of time, technology and politics. . . . Honey Hunger. . . succeeds in drawing the reader into a distinctly drawn landscape and way of life.”
— Irish Times

“Honey Hunger beautifully highlights the connections between bees and people, and it showcases our bond with nature and how we strive to protect our ecosystems together. The author draws a lot of knowledge about beekeeping from his own life which adds a wonderful touch to the story, inviting readers to reflect on both the literal and metaphorical significance of sweetness and the insatiable craving for something more in life.”
— Rana Asfour, TMR Book Club

“Hypnotic”
— AramcoWorld

“Alqasmi uses simple, elegant language to describe Azzan’s beekeeping tasks and the dramatic landscape, two motifs to which his narrative keeps returning.”
— Booklist

“Literary takes on the human experience. . . . Azzan exhibits external quiet and calm, but his thoughts are revelatory, illuminating his ardent passion for beekeeping.”
— Foreword Reviews

“The storytelling is poetic, creative, and striking.”
— Al-Quds Al-Arabi

PRAISE FOR ZAHRAN ALQASMI:

"Rich yet accessible prose"—The National

"Sensitive poetic language . . . transports us"—Mohammed Achaari, International Prize for Arabic Fiction Judge

PRAISE FOR MARILYN BOOTH:

"Words touch down delicately on each page. . . . formidable"—Electric Literature (on Bitter Orange Tree)

"Gorgeously translated"—The Washington Post (on Bitter Orange Tree)

"Booth’s translation honors the elliptical rhythms of Arabic and the language’s rich literary heritage. She imbues the book’s numerous poetic extracts with lyricism and devotedly preserves the rhymes and cadences of its proverbs."—The New York Times (on Celestial Bodies)

"The estimable Marilyn Booth"—The New Yorker (on Girls of Riyadh)

★ Zahran Alqasmi, author who won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and Marilyn Booth, translator who won the International Booker Prize, have teamed up to bring you a gripping novel that tells a story of desire, confusion, and ultimately hope.

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) Zahran Alqasmi 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 pub-lished ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.

(Translator) Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford Uni-versity. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English, and her translation of Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies was awarded the International Booker Prize. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.