Sweetness in the Belly is a historical fiction set in 20th-century Ethiopia. Despite the potential problems faced by a Western writer choosing to narrate an African past, Camilla Gibb has created a novel that is culturally sensitive, consummately researched and deeply compassionate.
A social anthropologist before she became a novelist, Gibb spent a year doing fieldwork in the fabled city of Harar, where much of her novel is set. Yet Sweetness wears its research lightly. Its Ethiopia is seen very much from the ground up, for Gibb’s powers of evocation, combined with her ingenious invention of a main character who is at once insider and outsider, enable her to embed the reader in the very war zones she describes: Harar during the turbulent last years of Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign and, in a parallel narrative, the Ethiopian refugee community of 1980s London.
Like Thelma in Gibb’s award-winning debut novel, Mouthing the Words...
Cathy Stonehouse is the author of three books, including the story collection Something About the Animal (Biblioasis, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia.
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