Celestial Bodies (Arabic: سيدات القمر, romanized: Sayyidat al-Qamar, lit.

The novel follows the lives of three sisters and their unhappy marriages in al-Awafi, Oman.

[8] Celestial Bodies is also the first novel to be translated from Arabic to win the prize.

[9] Kirkus Reviews described Celestial Bodies as "a richly layered, ambitious work that teems with human struggles and contradictions, providing fascinating insight into Omani history and society",[10] while Publishers Weekly expressed that the novel "rewards readers willing to assemble the pieces of Alharthi’s puzzle into a whole, and is all the more satisfying for the complexity of its tale.

"[11] The New Yorker stated that Alharthi "gives each chapter, in loose rotation, to the voice of a single character, and so makes contemporary female interiority crucial to her book while accommodating a variety of very different world views", [12] while The Irish Times commented that the novel "deftly undermines recurrent stereotypes about Arab language and cultures but most importantly brings a distinctive and important new voice to world literature.