Salt Houses

Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan

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.

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.

Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR * Nylon * Kirkus Reviews * Bustle * BookPage

“Moving and beautifully written.”
— Entertainment Weekly “

[Alyan is] a master.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Beautiful . . . An example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us.”
— NPR

“Gorgeous and sprawling . . . Heart-wrenching, lyrical and timely.”
— Dallas Morning News “

[Salt Houses] illustrate[s] the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter.”
— New York Times Book Review

About the Author

HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by TheNew Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, LitHub,the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist. 

Publisher : Mariner Books; 2018
Language : English
Paperback : 336 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-1328915856