Hala Alyan

Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between security and happiness, religion and heritage, where war is constant, yet peace is found. In the exquisite prose of a poet, Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart.

A fiercely-told story of a family fleeing and rebuilding their lives.

Hala Alyan's Salt Houses flies like a searchlight between history and fiction, unearthing the life of a single displaced Palestinian family among the rubble and illuminating it so deeply, so brilliantly, we cannot help but connect the story's richly imagined past to our very real present.

Mira Jacob, author of THE SLEEPWALKER'S GUIDE TO DANCING

Upon finishing I was quite overwhelmed by the impact of what was a masterfully written exploration into the mystery of identity rooted in place, family and memory, and the opportunity for redemption and healing through new generations… A moving and skilfully executed novel, Alyan’s debut is well worth discovering.

Reading Salt Houses is like having your coffee grounds read: cosmic, foreboding and titillating all at once. In this magnificent debut, Alyan’s powerful and poetic voice guides us into the dark recesses of history and leads us right up to the present tensions between East &amp; West, the modern &amp; ancestral, the hopeless and the hopeful.

Aline Ohanesian, author of ORHAN'S INHERITANCE

A striking debut of the disruptions and dispersals of exile, Salt Houses is a heartfelt portrait of the Palestinian diaspora. Powerful, lyrical, and deftly layered with multiple voices, Hala Alyan has done the near impossible: illuminated a half-century of wrenching history with great intimacy.

Salt Houses illuminates the heartache and permanent unsettledness experienced by refugees all over the world, reminding readers of the burdens and the blessings of home.

Lyrical . . . Heartbreaking . . . Important.

Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.

[This] remarkable debut novel . . .unfolds kaleidoscopically and elliptically, and to supremely good effect . . . [It] showcases [Alyan's] lyrical facility . . . [with] captivating prose that manages to be both tender and powerful.

'A piercingly elegant novel . . . with the power to both break and mend your heart.' Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane 
 
'Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.' Red 
 
Where do you go when you can’t go home? 
 
On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. 
 
Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget. 
 
When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.

Hala Alyan

Praise for Salt Houses

Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between securi ...

A fiercely-told story of a family fleeing and rebuilding their lives.

Heartbreaking.

Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between securi ...

A fiercely-told story of a family fleeing and rebuilding their lives.

Heartbreaking.

Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between securi ...

A fiercely-told story of a family fleeing and rebuilding their lives.

Heartbreaking.

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