Name: Salt Houses
Rating: 3.921052631578947 (19 reviews)
ISBN: 9781328915856

Hala Alyan

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home

Salt Houses

Bekki

She was barely three when the Israeli army rolled through Jaffa’s streets, the tanks smashing the marketplace, the soldiers dragging half-sleeping men from their homes. 

There would be the birth of a new nation, they declared. 

Salma and Hussam’s villa sat atop a small hill that overlooked the sea, with orange groves banded beneath it in strips. 

Within days the groves were mangled, soil impaled with wooden stakes, oranges scattered, pulp leaking from battered flesh. 

Alia had cried not at the sound of gunfire but at the smell of the mashed oranges, demanding slices of the fruit

They stood on the veranda while the children slept, watching the fire streak across their land, listening to the muffled shouts. 

The smell of burned oranges rose to them, scorched and sweet.

Still, her heart stirred when Alia, even at six, seven years old, spoke with the reverence of a mythologist about the enormous Jaffa pomegranates, the seeds that could be spooned out and sprinkled with either salt or sugar, depending on their ripeness. 

“They were as big as the moon,” little Alia would say, holding her starfish hands out, her voice confident. 

It would become the girl’s most endearing and exasperating quality, how she could become enamored of things already gone.

Some mornings he wakes early, full of energy and purpose, sets out to the marketplace before work and returns with bags of tomatoes, cheese wedges, pita bread still steaming. 

Other times he scrounges, making meals of almonds and a handful of figs, a desultory bite of fruit.

From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home 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, their land, and their story as they know it, 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. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand--one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again.

Beautiful prose, foreign/exotic locale. Plot revolved around a complex multi-generational family. So good.

Sarah Erle

Daryl Houston

Just a really nicely done book that navigates generations and cultures and nationalities and national tragedies with what feels like (but surely wasn't) ease. Although the family's experience is vastly different from any of my own experiences, I felt like I was right there with them -- they felt familiar and lovely and awful, as families do -- across all these navigated boundaries. One of my favorite reads of the year so far.

Salt Houses

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