Salt Houses: A Novel
by Hala Alyan
Buy on Amazon"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 & West, the modern & ancestral, the hopeless and the hopeful." --Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan's Inheritance 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.…
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"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 Books We Love — 2017 · apps.npr.org