The novel splits its time equally between Lily's life now, living with a friend from Ethiopia named Amina and other immigrants in an apartment and working as a nurse for the National Health service, and her past in the walled city of Harar. Sweetness in the Belly begins with main character Lily declaring her status as a white Muslim living in public housing in London. She has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and her academic work strongly influences the historical research in many of her novels. Gibb was born in London, studied at the American University in Cairo, and now lives in Toronto, Canada. After its publication in 2005, the book was nominated and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award, and in 2006 received the Trillium Award for the best book in Ontario. Sweetness in the Belly is her most critically acclaimed novel. Her first book, Mouthing the Words, won the City of Toronto Book prize. Camilla Gibb is the author of four novels and a memoir.

The novel tells the life story of Lily, who is raised a devout Muslim, falls in love with a fellow outcast and dark-skinned revolutionary named Aziz, and finally lives her life in exile back in England, living in public housing. The book tells the story of Lily, the daughter of two Irish immigrants living in Morocco who is raised by Moroccan and Ethiopian locals when her parents are murdered in an alley near the Sufi shrine in Bilal al Habash. The result is a fascinating and remarkably moving portrayal of a life lived at the cusp of two cultures.Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb is an atmospheric, historical romance novel published in 2005. She draws us just as completely into the mind of the older Lilly, emotionally paralysed by her loss. Camilla Gibb's evocation of the distinctive world of the ancient city and of its unique religion and culture is vivid and rich. But then convulsions of a new revolutionary order separate them, sending Lilly to an England, she has never seen, while Aziz disappears. She is drawn to the idealistic young doctor, Aziz, himself an outsider in the community.

Back in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, the young Lilly, born in the 1950s to British parents, now orphaned and full of religious conviction, finds herself living in the city of Harare.

As Ethiopian refugees gradually fill the flats of the housing estate where she lives, Lilly tentatively begins to share with them her longing for the home she herself once had in Africa, and her heartbreaking search for her missing lover. In Thatcher's London, Lilly, a white Muslim nurse, struggles in a state of invisible exile.