Salt Houses

Author: Hala Alyan

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $35.00 NZD
  • : 9781786330420
  • : Random House
  • : Hutchinson
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  • : May 2017
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 35.0
  • : June 2017
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Hala Alyan
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  • : Paperback
  • : 617
  • :
  • : English
  • : 813.6
  • :
  • : 320
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Barcode 9781786330420
9781786330420

Description

Named a Best Book of the Year byNPR *Nylon *Kirkus Reviews *Bustle *BookPage
 
"Moving and beautifully written." --Entertainment Weekly

"[Alyan is] a master." --Los Angeles Review of Books


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. 
            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.
 
"Beautiful . . . An example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us." -- NPR
 
"Gorgeous and sprawling . . . Heart-wrenching, lyrical and timely." --Dallas Morning News
 
"[Salt Houses] illustrate[s] the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter." --New York Times Book Review

Reviews

"Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between security and happiness, religion and heritage, where war is constant, yet peace is found. In the exquisite prose of a poet, Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart." -- Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane "Hala Alyan's Salt Houses flies like a searchlight between history and fiction, unearthing the life of a single displaced Palestinian family among the rubble and illuminating it so deeply, so brilliantly, we cannot help but connect the story's richly imagined past to our very real present." -- Mira Jacob, author of THE SLEEPWALKER'S GUIDE TO DANCING "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 "A striking debut of the disruptions and dispersals of exile, Salt Houses is a heartfelt portrait of the Palestinian diaspora. Powerful, lyrical, and deftly layered with multiple voices, Hala Alyan has done the near impossible: illuminated a half-century of wrenching history with great intimacy." -- Cristina Garcia, author of KING OF CUBA "Salt Houses illuminates the heartache and permanent unsettledness experienced by refugees all over the world, reminding readers of the burdens and the blessings of home." Bustle

Author description

Hala Alyan was born in 1986. After living in various parts of the Middle East, she completed a doctorate in clinical psychology at NYU and is now in private practice. She has been published in Guernica and other literary journals, and is the award-winning author of three poetrycollections.