Salt Houses
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award
A Best Book of the Year: NPR • NYLON • Kirkus • Bustle • BookPage
"What does home mean when you no longer have a house—or a homeland? This beautiful novel traces one Palestinian family's struggle with that question and how it can haunt generations. . . . This is an example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us." — NPR
Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses follows three generations of a Palestinian family and asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.
On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home and their land, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities.
Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This multigenerational saga portrays the experience of Palestinian displacement through the life of one middle-class family. Reading her daughter Alia’s coffee grounds on Alia’s wedding day, Salma sees travel and luck, but also disorder. Although the Palestinian matriarch keeps quiet, her forecast turns into reality as the entire family is displaced by the Six-Day War of 1967, then carry on through another war and across continents, always remembering their lost home in Nablus. In her stunningly poetic novel, Hala Alyan beautifully conveys the pain and confusion of losing one’s home and, ultimately, the struggle to maintain a Palestinian identity. Seamlessly shifting perspectives between Alia and her children, Alyan sensitively depicts the complicated relationships and everyday concerns of three generations as they’re dispersed across the Middle East and then to Europe and America. Constantly, they try to either preserve or redefine their senses of self through the changing times.
