Sweetness in the Belly (2005) by Camilla Gibb chronicles the experiences of Lilly Abdal, a white Muslim woman raised in Africa and forced to flee to London from her adopted home, the Ethiopian walled city of Harar, as revolution and civil war escalate in Ethiopia in the 1970s. The novel weaves Lilly’s life in Harar with her new life in Thatcher’s London and deals with interrelated issues such as religion, the condition of women, exile and cross-cultural relations. It foregrounds the complexity of Lilly’s plural self and her multiple displacement across Africa and then in London, thus enriching a thriving canon of transnational writing in English. Drawing on the insights provided by recent theoretical works on “translational writing” (Gilmour, 2012; Gilmour and Steinitz, 2017) and on “narratives of translation” in English literature (Doloughan, 2015), as well as on critical examinations of refugeehood in literary works (Woolley, 2014), this article will discuss ways in which the narrative hinges around Lilly’s transnational/translational identity. It will bring into focus both the linguistic tapestry of the novel and Lilly’s hybrid in-between status, enhanced by her professional role as a nurse in a derelict London neighbourhood, where she also performs a liaising role for immigrants and refugees.