Salt Houses
On Sale: 06/05/2018
Salt Houses
On Sale: 06/05/2018
Format:
About the Book
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by NPR * Nylon * Kirkus Reviews * Bustle * BookPage
“Moving and beautifully written.” — Entertainment Weekly
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.
“[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
Critical Praise
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Fiction Winner of the Arab American Book Award, Fiction A Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize An NPR Best Book of 2017 One of NYLON's Best Fiction Books of 2017 One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2017 One of Bustle's 17 Best Fiction Books of 2017 One of BookPage's Best Books of 2017 An Indie Next Pick “Moving and beautifully written, Alyan’s debut chronicles three generations of a Palestinian family as they face two life-altering displacements – the first after 1967’s Six-Day War, and the second following Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.” —Entertainment Weekly “Spring's most powerful novel...mystical, compelling...sweeping.” —Town & Country "[Salt Houses] illustrate[s] the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter." —New York Times Book Review “Some family stories we pass on, adding chapters like rooms to a house; others are burned into our subconscious. Poet Hala Alyan's ambitious debut novel, Salt Houses follows the scattered generations of one Palestinian family for whom 'nostalgia is an affliction,' moving from the Six-Day War and a future glimpsed in a daughter's lipsticked coffee cup, to 9/11 and its aftermath.” —Vogue “Alyan is doing important work through this novel...Salt Houses can be read very simply as a family drama, proving Alyan’s talent as a master of both the family drama genre as well as the depths and complexities of the Palestinian displacement.” —Los Angeles Review of Books "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. Hala Alyan's own family history – for years, she felt as if she belonged nowhere – clearly informed her book, but her professional life as a clinical psychologist who has worked with refugee clients plays a part too. Along with another favorite from this year – Mohsin Hamid's Exit West – this is an example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us." —NPR "Read Salt Houses...In Hala Alyan's novel about a Palestinian family in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, children rebel and return and the matriarch's memories fade with age, fraying the brood's ties to their homeland. In the process, the book reveals the inner lives of people too often lumped together in the service of politics." —New York "Alyan explores the human agency in the face of the harshest realities without compromising the complex nature of the Palestinian diaspora. This is a heart-wrenching, intimate look at the intergenerational impact of losing a homeland." —Ms. Magazine "Gorgeous and sprawling...In many ways, Salt Houses is about the displacement of millions in war-ravaged lands. But more precisely, it's about the significance of 'home'— what it means to make a home, to lose it, and to go home again when nothing looks or feels the same...Heart-wrenching, lyrical and timely, < —
-Product Details
- ISBN: 9781328915856
- ISBN 10: 1328915859
- Imprint: Harper Perennial
- On Sale: 06/05/2018
- Pages: 336
- List Price:21.00 CAD
- BISAC1 : FICTION / Sagas
- BISAC2 : FICTION / Literary
- BISAC3 : FICTION / Cultural Heritage
- BISAC4 : FICTION / Family Life
