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Every year I notice some theme sneak into my reading. This year, it's love. I'd rather focus on love to help me forget the hate in the world. I read somewhere that Melinda Gates chooses a word each year for her resolution of sorts, so there it is, my reading resolution. The love story drew me to this novel but the 'mood' kept me enthralled. This is Leila Aboulela's first novel and atmospherically, it is distinct.

She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly, the days in chunk after chunk. Now every day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

With this New York Times Notable Book, I traversed Aberdeen, Scotland and Khartoum, Sudan with a woman grieving the loss of her husband. With admirable restraint and lucidity, the third-person narrative becomes so close that her vulnerability is laid bare. A Sudanese mother who cannot hold her child, cannot wake up or walk up the stairs without effort, cannot return to her homeland. She is depressed, angry, helpless, broken. What sustains her is her work as an Arabic translator at a university. She works for an Islamic scholar who listens to her, asks for her opinions, makes her feel visible again in a world where she feels isolated, a woman of a different culture and religion. She starts to look forward to her days at the university, looks forward to the end of the day when the professor emerges from the lecture hall and they can talk about works needing translation, talk about religion like scholars. A mesh of faith and love, this novel is an experimentation of love at the intersection of culture and religion, a notable journey across continents.