Salt Houses

By Hala Alyan

Book Overview

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 is a multigenerational saga that 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.

A remarkable work of diaspora fiction, Salt Houses is a debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1328915859
• ISBN13: 9781328915856
• Release Date: June 2018
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Salt Houses

I liked this, but is it my favorite multi-generational Palestinian family saga? No, that honor actually belongs to A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum but I digress. This one was a hard one to rate because I liked jumping from family member to family member but I feel like there wasn't an overarching plot necessarily? Other than the family's constant displacement but does that count as a whole plot point? I'm not sure. I think this is worth reading, if family sagas and generational trauma is something you reach for in a story. I myself fade in and out of these genres, depending on how they're written. You also do not have to take this review seriously, I'm at my end of year burn out and it's entirely possible the fatigue has affected my rating.

It shook me to the core

Beautifully written! Each character intertwined with each other through space, time, and generations... A definite page turner!

Impossible to forget

I’ve thought about this book every day since reading it. I loved every bit of it, it is an incredible novel