Booth’s translation honors the elliptical rhythms of Arabic and the language’s rich literary heritage. She imbues the book’s numerous poetic extracts with lyricism and devotedly preserves the rhymes and cadences of its proverbs. (“The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache.”) Yet there is no doubt that this is a contemporary novel, insistent and alive.

Abdallah may be our guide, but — privileged and irresolute — he is anchored to the past; the divergent fates of three sisters draw Alharthi’s tale into the future. When watchful Mayya marries Abdallah she quashes a fierce, unrequited love for another man. She calls her first child London, a name that provokes family ridicule but is as much a promise to her daughter as it is an act of rebellion: Your world, it suggests, will be bigger than mine. Bookish Asma is “not in any hurry to embrace all the joys of love in one gulp of intoxicating ether”; when she marries an ambitious artist, she leverages his desire for status to complete her education. Finally, there is beautiful Khawla, whose version of love is “sublime and self-immolating”; but the cousin to whom she is promised has emigrated to Canada and no one expects him to return. There is no right way to love, the sisters’ stories suggest, just as there is no right — or single — way to be a woman.

Caught between the earth and the heavens, between “the sublime and the filth of creation,” the moon is, Alharthi writes, “the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below.” “Celestial Bodies” is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets.