March 2021
Ethiopia is the theme of my 2021 food and lit challenge as I was searching for books to read in this category other than nonfiction 640 and 900s in the library- this book popped up.
(I love the Dewey Decimal Classification System)
Book by Camilla Gibb
Sweetness in the Belly.
After her hippie British parents are murdered, Lilly is raised at a Sufi shrine in Morocco. As a young woman she goes on pilgrimage to Harar, Ethiopia, where she teaches Qur’an to children and falls in love with an idealistic doctor. But even swathed in a traditional headscarf, Lilly can’t escape being marked as a foreigner. Forced to flee Ethiopia for England, she must once again confront the riddle of who she is and where she belongs.
A richly imagined tale of one woman’s search for love and belonging.
In Thatcher’s London, Lilly, a white Muslim nurse, struggles in a state of invisible exile. As Ethiopian refugees gradually fill the flats of the housing estate where she lives, Lilly tentatively begins to share with them her longing for the home she herself once had in Africa and her heartbreaking search for her missing lover.
Back in Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, the young Lilly, born in the 1950s to British parents, now orphaned and full of religious conviction, finds herself living in the city of Harar. She is drawn to the idealistic young doctor, Aziz, himself an outsider in the community. But then convulsions of a new revolutionary order separate them, sending Lilly to an England she has never seen, while Aziz disappears.
Ack this book, so good. I found out today it’s also a movie, so, now to find it. However this usually doesn’t work well for me…
I recommend reading this, it is very timely to today. I loved Lilly.
Foods of Ethiopia has very simple easy recipes and descriptions to get you into the culture and the food easily, simply. This is a children’s book, most likely in many school libraries, but to learn about a country you don’t have working knowledge about, it is really well done. It would be amazing for a classroom or to use as a family to learn about a new way of how some people do life. All the recipes are so easy to follow and most likely you have the ingredients in your house.
On to more books and more learning. Ethiopia has been fascinating so far.
