Salt Houses

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

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 News