This week the Bookworm Beat talks to Canadian writer Camilla Gibb about her new novel, ?Sweetness in the Belly? published in 2005 by Doubleday. Sweetness in the Belly (fiction) is about Lilly, the daughter of English hippies.

When she is eight years old her parents leave her in Ethiopia with a Sufi sheikh known as The Great Abdal. Her parents never return for her, and she is raised as a devote Muslim. At the age of 19, she becomes a refugee along with thousands of others in 1970s London. There, she sets up a refugee help centre, and waits, and waits for news of her lover, who is feared dead. Although she has returned to the country of her birth, it in no way feels like home.

Although Ms Gibb is not Muslim or a refugee, ?Sweetness In the Belly? has received much praise from reviewers for its empathy.

?I completely understand Lilly?s sense of exile,? said Ms Gibb in a telephone interview with the Bookworm Beat. ?I was born in England, but raised in Canada so I have duel citizenship. I suppose that is what it means to be Canadian ? everyone is from somewhere else. I don?t have extended family here. I don?t relate to the landscape.?

Sweetness in the Belly began as a post-doctoral research for the University of Toronto. To write her dissertation she travelled to Ethiopia and spent quite a lot of time there. Although the story is fictional many of the characters are inspired by people she met in Ethiopia.

?I was in Ethiopia in the mid 1990s,? Ms Gibbs said.

?I wrote a PhD thesis based on that field work experience. I knew I wanted to come back to that material.?

However, she said in order to turn her thesis into a book, she had to completely forget about her thesis. In the meantime, she wrote two other books, ?Mouthing the Words? and ?The Petty Details of So-and-So?s Life?.

?I had to become a writer first and find the language of fiction, before I could take on the complicated material in Sweetness in the Belly.

?It was during the course of writing my second book that I got this voice in my head.

?It was the voice of a completely high bred, dislocated, broken character. I wondered what was the story of this character?s life? How do you connect the pieces ? a childhood of British origin but raised in a Muslim community? She made the connections for me.?

Ms Gibb said writing Sweetness in the Belly was a long process. She initially wrote Lilly?s story from childhood, but then later, started the book mostly from Lilly at the age of 19.

?I threw out the entire draft and started again so she was grown up,? she said.

There is been quite a lot in the American media about the plight of women in Islamic countries, but Sweetness In the Belly is not a book about a woman victimised by her faith. Like everyone else in Ethiopia at the time, Lilly is caught up in the political upheaval, but her faith itself is not the oppressor.

?The western media often portrays the veil as a symbol of oppression, but for many Muslim women the choice to wear the veil is complex and deeply personal,? said Ms Gibb.

Since the book was published she has received many positive letters from Muslim women.

?I would have been writing about Islam in this way whether or not September 11 had happened,? said Ms Gibb. ?I started writing in 2000. After awhile, though, I realised that I was portraying a much softer side of Islam than the one I was seeing in the media.

?For someone like Lilly, her religious faith is the only through-line she has through this tremendous disaster and loss. It is the only thing that grounds her in the community. However, Lilly has her own challenges with her religion. She is in a constant state of negotiation with it. It is not a constant blind acceptance, but an on-going negotiation.?

Not only has Ms Gibb had positive feedback from Muslim women, but from Ethiopians in general.

?Most of the characters in the book are Oromo, a specific Ethiopian group. Historically they have been repressed and marginalised. It was uplifting for them to see their experience depicted as being important.?

Ms Gibb is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto.

She is also vice-president of Pen Canada, an association of writers with the goal of defending freedom of expression.

?Some things are very dear to my heart,? said Ms Gibb. ?This is especially true of freedom of expression. In Canada we have a number of writers living in exile. Many of them have been imprisoned for speaking out against the government. Pen lobbies with foreign governments to try and give a safe haven to writers. There are different Pen chapters around the world.?

She said it was a journalist she met through Pen that influenced her to go to Ethiopia in the first place.

Ms Gibb has received a number of awards for her work, including the Toronto Book Award in 2000, the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction in 2001, and she was recently added to the Orange Futures List, a prestigious list of young writers to watch out for.

For more information about Camilla Gibb check out her website at http://www.camillagibb.ca/