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Title details for Salt Houses by Hala Alyan - Available

Salt Houses

by Hala Alyan
Leila Buck
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award

A Best Book of the Year: NPR • NYLON • Kirkus • Bustle • BookPage

"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. ... This is an example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us."—NPR

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.

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 and their land, 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.

Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 2, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781501941542
      • File size: 352930 KB
      • Duration: 12:15:16

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Leila Buck gives voice to a family divided by politics yet kept together by love in this historical novel set against the backdrop of Palestine in the late 1960s. Throughout her narration, Buck uses a somber tone that hints at the coming trauma and separation. She tells listeners in a subdued voice of the family's downward spiral as they are, first, displaced from Nablus and, later, separated in war-torn Kuwait. Beginning with Salma, the matriarch, listeners experience the heartbreaking decisions facing displaced people during times of social and political instability. With a story that rings familiar in our turbulent times, Buck manages capably with her characterizations of both male and female characters. M.R. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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