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

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.

“[Alyan is] a master.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“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

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: June 5, 2018
Subjects: Fiction Sagas Literary Cultural Heritage

About the Author: Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, and won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Town & Country called it “spring’s most powerful novel.” Her newest poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.