Salt Houses
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.
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Community Reviews
She story tells with the weight of facts, but served in a fictional tale.
This book read like a multi-generational, mutli POV movie, I walked into the kitchen and living rooms and heard whispers between family. I felt the sadness of phone calls made. I felt so much. I love books like this, where it leaves me to sit with the characters reality and haunts me days after.
If you can, I highly recommend doing the audio version. The narrator truly took on all the various POVs and brought them to life.
“Poor innocent things, he thinks. What is a life? A series of yeses and noes, photographs you shove in a drawer somewhere, loves you think will save you but that cannot. Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That’s all life is, he wants to tell her. It’s continuing.” (Atef)
"Atef lets himself picture the courtyard of the nearby mosque, the rustle of olive trees, the blank stone of the graves. Death in rows. His son once told him about a cemetery plot in Boston where seven, eight generations of a family were buried. Karam marveled at the concept, full centuries of family buried in the same dirt. Here, there was only Salma and Widad, the aunts that moved here from Nablus. No one knows where Mustafa was buried. Atef, when his time comes, will be buried here as well. What about his children, he thinks, would they be buried in America? Beirut? What about the grandchildren?” (Atef)
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