Raincoast Books

What Will You Read Next?

Salt Houses

9780544912588

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Available: 05/02/17
6 x 9 · 320 pages
9780544912588
CDN $38.00 · cl

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Hala Alyan

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

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, their land, and their story as they know it, 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.

Lyrical and heartbreaking, S alt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand-one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again."

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 novel The Arsonists' City and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica . She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.