Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize* Fiction Winner of the Arab American Book Award * 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, Salt Houses is a humanizing examination of a family torn apart and remade by conflicts both too complex to grasp fully and too personal to not recognize in ourselves, wherever we might call home." —Dallas Morning NewsSalt Houses is a humanizing examination of a family torn apart and remade by conflicts both too complex to grasp fully and too personal to not recognize in ourselves, wherever we might call home." — Dallas Morning News
"What happens when displacement enters your DNA? This is the questions that Alyan's brilliant debut novel both poses and answers, and—to borrow a heavily used phrase—it feels like one we particularly need to be asking ourselves right now...[Alyan is] an extraordinarily gifted novelist...[Salt Houses is] an epic in every sense of the word...[It] shines in its intimate details; notably, in the ways in which no character is allowed to be a stereotype, and in the way it grapples with those all too human-scaled experiences of alienation and belonging, displacement and rebuilding. Alyan might be grappling with universal problems like war and brutality, but since she renders them through the perspective of one family, through their personal triumphs and struggles, she keeps these issues on a recognizable scale." — NYLON, Best Fiction Books
"Each new chapter of Salt Houses shifts perspective and jumps in time...These perspectives touch back on each other through small details, fashioning a collective, familial history. One character’s revelations illuminate the life of another...Alyan’s talent is immediately apparent in her exquisitely detailed scenes and the complex ways her characters relate to one another...Alyan is also a poet, and the last pages of Salt Houses drop like the end of a poem—they crush the reader while also lifting her up...Narratives like this one complicate and humanize America’s simplistic view of Arab cultures, toppling the flimsy idea that Arab people are intractably Other." — The Rumpus
“In her debut novel, Alyan tells the story of a Palestinian family that is uprooted by the Six-Day War of 1967 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This heartbreaking and important story examines displacement, belonging, and family in a lyrical style.” — The Millions, “Most Anticipated"
“At the very start of Hala Alyan's novel Salt Houses, a woman buys a coffee set — a dozen cups, a coffee pot, a tray. It's a simple act that unexpectedly becomes painful . . . Alyan builds her story on little moments like that — a peek into the lives of several generations, forced to relocate and resettle. Her characters are lost and looking for a home.” — NPR, "Morning Edition"
“This sweeping family drama brings history to life by imagining events that befall a Palestinian family from 1963 to 2014. Buffeted by war and political turmoil — the Six-Day War in 1967, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 — the family is constantly uprooted, forcing its members to adopt new cultures in Paris, Beirut and Boston. It's a lyrical exploration of identity.” — AARP
“Stunning...[Salt Houses] offers such a piercing examination of displacement, identity, faith, and what one character refers to as a lifetime of 'emotional code-switching.'” — Brooklyn Magazine
★ 03/27/2017
Alyan blends joy with pain, frustration with elation, longing with boredom in this beautiful debut novel filled with the panoply of life. The frontispiece tells the whole story in microcosm with a family tree of the Palestinian Yacoub family, who, for most of the book, no longer lives in Palestine. One brother, Mustafa, is lost in the Six-Day War and the sisters, Alia and Widad, relocate to Kuwait while their mother, Salma, moves to Jordan. Later generations end up in France, America, and Lebanon. Alia, the young bride in 1963 in the first pages, is the family matriarch with Alzheimer’s as the book comes to a close. In 1977, her daughter, Souad, is a tantrum-throwing five-year-old in Kuwait City; by 1990, she is a student in Paris entering into an ill-considered marriage, then, 14 years later, a divorced mother of two, recently relocated from America to Beirut. Chapters focus on different family members as time and geography shift. These lives full of promise and loss will feel familiar to any reader; Alyan’s excellent storytelling and deft handling of the complex relationships ensures that readers will not soon forget the Yacoub family. (May)
02/15/2017
In what feels like a very personal debut novel, the award-winning poet Alyan, her lyrical skills on full display, traces four generations of the Yacoub family as they are forced into the ranks of the Palestinian diaspora. Constantly uprooted by war, Salma, Hussam, and their children Widad, Alia, and Mustafa make disparate decisions that have ramifications for their offspring over five decades. First fleeing Israeli tanks that bulldoze through their home in Jaffa, later settling in Nablus, only to be routed by the 1967 Six-Day War, Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate with her sister Widad to Kuwait. Salma, now a widow, joins the family in Amman, Jordan, while Mustafa, the rebellious brother who was the light around which his family circled, disappears. The Yacoubs are fortunate. Not relegated to refugee camps, they have the wherewithal to fashion new lives for themselves. Still, Alyan makes it abundantly clear how displaced persons, separated from their culture, their religion, and their homeland, are forever altered. VERDICT This timely historical does for the Palestinians what Khaled Hosseini did for the people of Afghanistan. By placing readers inside the hearts and minds of one Arab family scattered from Paris to Boston to Lebanon, she beautifully illustrates the resilience of the human spirit. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
★ 2017-02-21
"Nostalgia is an affliction" a character states in Palestinian-American poet Alyan's impressive first novel, which tracks the dispersal of four generations of a Palestinian family.As matriarch Salma reads the future in a cup of coffee the night before her daughter Alia's wedding in 1963, the Yacoub family has already been uprooted for 15 years. In the decades to come the Yacoubs' distinctly personal experiences will mirror the experiences of immigrants and refugees around the world and the Palestinians' dislocation in particular. Salma feels lucky; unlike others moved into resettlement camps when Israelis forced them from Jaffa, her husband's wealth afforded them a house in Nablus. But transience has become the Yacoubs' way of life. Alia's older, more traditional sister, Widad, has already moved to Kuwait in an arranged marriage. When the Six-Day War breaks out in 1967, Alia happens to be visiting Widad in Kuwait City while her husband, Atef, and beloved brother, Mustafa, close friends and anti-occupation activists, remain trapped in Palestine. Only Atef makes it to Kuwait, with a secret guilt that will haunt him for years. Unlike her sister, the independent-minded Alia has married Atef, a professor, for love. Their difficult marriage becomes one of the novel's most compelling elements as the couple creates a life in Kuwait with their three children—Riham, Karam, and Souad—until the 1990 Iraq-Kuwait war forces them to flee to Amman. Karam is sent to college in Boston and becomes an assimilated American despite summers with his kids in an inherited apartment in Beirut. Artsy Souad also ends up in Boston but never feels at home in America. After a divorce, she moves to Beirut, where she re-creates herself. While more traditionally religious than her relatively cosmopolitan siblings, Riham is as disturbed as any Western reader when her adolescent stepson flirts with political extremism. In the next generation, Souad's daughter finds her own sense of displacement painful yet freeing. It's not always easy to follow Alyan's complex geographic and emotional mapping, but this journey is well worth taking.A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora.
