Review of Sweetness in the Belly

Review of Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb (Penguin, 2006)

First aired on NPR May 10, 2006

AN ENGLISH-BORN NURSE NAMED LILLY, who, after the death of her hippie parents in North Africa, is raised by a Moroccan Sufi imam and later emigrates to Harar, Ethiopia, and London. That's the material of a new novel by Toronto fiction writer Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly.

Lilly's story itself opens in the multicultural London of the 1980s, after she has returned to her late parents' native England for medical training. She's working at a...