In the United States, we often think of immigration and displacement as something we see every day and perhaps unique to use. Immigration and displacement happens across the globe including the Middle East. This story is focused on the displacement caused by the various wars starting in the 1980s and going until 2000s. We see how immigration looks to when Kuwaitis go to Jordan and other countries. Trying to keep a family together despite displacement. How the fear of war impacts the rest of our lives. It is an amazing journey. Highly recommended.

Salt Houses is a very interesting novel about what it is like to live as a Palestinian in the Middle East.
Author, Hala Alyan, an American Palestinian is writing about what it is like to be a middle class, well to do, educated Palestinian family having to leave Israel and move from place to place. We start as the first generation of this multilayered family, watching through the eyes of Salma, as her family leaves Jaffa and moved their family to a home in Nablus, Palestine, the year is 1963. We follow in alternating chapters different members of the family in each generation as they live trough the history of the mideast. In 1965 we follow Mustafa, Salma's young adult son, who is visiting the Mosque and handing out anti Israel pamphlets. There is violence, arrests and deaths as the family again leaves separating between Amman and Kuwait City. We see how the Palestinian Israeli conflict could lead to radicalizing a young man.

We follow Salma's daughter, Alia and her husband, Atef as the newly married couple moves to Kuwait City. Salma joins her sister and other family living in Amman.
The reader is drawn in as each of the characters experiences the upheaval and fear as historical events impact their day to day lives. We listen with the family as the news reports the Kuwait airline hostage crisis.

Later generations start a new life in the United States, returning to spend summers in either Kuwait City or Amman with family. Souad, Alia and Atef's daughter returns from life in America, as a divorcee with two children. She come back to live in Beirut.

This is a story of both Palestinian displacement and family drama. This is a novel that examines the effects of loss and displacement of a family home even for the privileged. This novel explores the way outside forces affect our family lives and connections.

I have heard enough buzz about this book that I ended up purchasing a hard copy for myself! So excited to read it.

Unfortunately I didn't enjoy this book as much as I was expecting. Since this is a story about war and families separated I was expecting a very emotional read. The writing style wasn't for me. If feel unemotional and flat and I couldn't stay interested. I couldn't connect with the story or the characters.

Alyan has masterfully written a story of family that will appeal to readers who love getting to know characters.

Salt Houses sweeps through five generations, many settings, and several decades. The different perspectives offered a varied look at the lives and troubles of this family. I could have done without the Epilogue though.
Thank you, Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan has been one of my favorite books of the summer. The book follows a family through the generations--their relationships with each other, their sense of displacement through the different wars and how they navigate their culture and religion. I thought the author did a wonderful job creating distinct voices for each character. I never felt as though I wasn't sure whose chapter I was in, and given the number of characters included in the novel that is some feat.

I loved this novel. It takes a Palestinian family and follows different members throughout periods of conflict, chaos, and opportunity. It starts in the early 1960s and follows through the present day. It asks questions about home, family, belonging, and identity. Despite events often being dictated by war and early characters being forced into becoming refugees, the focus is much more domestic. The characters are worried about their relationships, their toys, their classes. I really appreciated the juxtaposition because so often characters in novels where war is present can only talk to each other about the war. There are tiny details that come back around and have a great impact. I will be nominating this for my book club for next year!

Salt Houses is a novel that eventually comes full circle, as it follows the female members of a Palestinian family as they flee, move, marry and cope with constantly being and feeling outside where they belong, including between generations and even between siblings.

Each chapter is titled with the name of one of the family, beginning with Salma, the mother of Alia, in Nablus, Palestine, the town she and her husband Hussam and their children fled to in 1948, following the Nakba (catastrophe). Alia is a child of war, barely three years old when they had to flee.

The opening lines are an indication of what is to come and intrigue us to want to know more, they remind me of a visit to Palestine where I first heard about this cultural divination practice, Tasseography, the art of reading coffee grinds, a ritual that dates back thousands of years.

“When Salma peers into her daughter’s coffee cup, she knows instantly she must lie.”

Alia’s older sister is married and lives in Kuwait, a land Alia is reluctant to visit, but when she does in 1967, finds she is unable to return to Palestine due to “the Setback” (the Six-Day-War), thus her children will know a home and culture, even though connected to her heritage, very different from her own.

As each generation makes a move, Hala Alyan takes the reader on an emotional journey of perseverance and loss, against a background of political manoeuvring. While the narrative avoids the conflict and brutality of war and deplacement, we become witness to the separation of a family from its roots, its culture, its land, and in particular the effect on a Palestinian family of the founding of Israel and the conflicts that followed that caused them to become refugees, firstly in their own country and latterly in neighbouring countries.

The separation is not just from their land and traditions, but between perceptions, as family members find it difficult to understand the yearnings of their elders and parents find it difficult to understand the foreigners their have become to them. Fortunately, like with many families, solace can sometimes be found for a child with their grandparent, those who have seen too much to be surprised by anything anymore, who have arrived at acceptance without judgement.

Salt is referred to throughout, invoking memories of family living near the sea displaced inland; fathers who “salted everything after that, even his water,” houses lost, eroded like salt; lives soothed by and almost taken by immersion in salt water. It is everpresent.

“The porcelain surface of the teacup is white as salt; the landscape of dregs, violent.”

Through it all Alia’s husband harbours a secret that torments him, one that he lives with by regularly writing letters that are never sent, seeking atonement.

The novel traverses with diligence a difficult period in the history of Palestine and the Middle East, demonstrating the resilience of humanity to survive, the sacrifices that are made and the cultural poverty that is experienced giving rise to the insatiable desire for families to remain connected, not just to each other but to the small yet important things, the traditional rice dishes, the olive, the orange tree, the desire to keep flowers blooming, no matter where they find themselves.

Their homes may crumble, but their spirits continue to reignite and flourish, wherever their heads may lie.

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American author, poet and practicing clinical psychologist living in Brooklyn, who spent her childhood moving between the Middle East and the US. Salt Houses is her debut novel and is inspired by some of her own extended family experiences.

“I definitely think there was an intergenerational trauma that went along with losing a homeland that you see trickle down through the different generations” Hala Alyan, NPR interview.

SALT HOUSES is a debut novel by Hala Alyan which follows four generations of the Yacoub family and received starred reviews from Kirkus ("A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora.") and Publishers Weekly ("Chapters focus on different family members as time and geography shift.").

I generally enjoy multi-generational stories and this one, while dealing with all of the interpersonal conflict amongst family members, also served to educate (or at least prompt questions) about cultural patterns and challenges in parts of the Middle East over the last 50 years. This fictional family seemed relatively affluent, but still faced major disruptions and felt the impact of the Six- Day War (1967 Arab–Israeli War), the invasion of Kuwait and conflicts in Beirut, Lebanon. At one point, a character muses, "What is life? ... Continuing to move, enduring, not stopping even when there is pain. That's all life is, he wants to tell her. It's continuing."

Consider pairing this with non-fictional works like Fast Times in Palestine, and add SALT HOUSES to your "to be read" pile. What else is already there? What are you looking forward to reading or recommending for summer reading?

The book maps the experiences of a Palestinian family across 4 generations (from the 1960s to 2000s). It talks about displacement by making references to war and/or conflict and it is through the characters that the emotional upheaval that often accompanies this process is effectively brought to light by Hala Alyan.

Full review on my blog Desi Lekh. Please follow the link below.

I couldn't put this story down. The sweeping multi-generational family story touched on all that makes us human, from identity to displacement and home. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

The past few days I read Salt Houses by Hala Alyan. I got an copy via Netgalley. This book is a multigenerational story about a family in the Middle East. It'a a heartbreaking but hopeful story about the pain and grief that war will bring you. But they always pick up the pieces, and try to move on and find there place in the world. It's a beautiful story about a part of the world I rearly read about. Beautifully written, highly reccomend it!

I think that this is more a personal taste thing than any problem with the novel, but I am not going to finish this one.

Salt Houses was really so great. It’s the story of a Palestinian family forced to leave their home during the war. Salma, the matriarch, reads her daughter Alia’s future in the tea leaves and vows never to tell her what she’s seen. Such an intriguing start to what turned out to be a great family saga. The format is exactly what I love in a family tale – perspective shifting from chapter to chapter so that you get multiple views of everyone and everything and feel like you’re holding the secrets and the facts and the family together. It got a little tiny bit long towards the end, but I loved it. 4.5 stars

This multi-generational story is a beautifully written debut novel. The story takes place between 1948 and 2014 and is told via shifting viewpoints of a Palestinian family. The author is genius at crafting her vibrant characters and how each personality deals with homeland instability, their struggles, upheavals and day to day uncertainty, the byproducts of middle eastern politics and war. I cared about what happened to each of them during tumultuous times. I know little of the Middle East culture and appreciated being schooled in the cultural differences between generations. The unforgettable story pulled me in from the start.

Thank you for making this title available. Unfortunately, the further I read, the more I was convinced that this was not the kind of book that I would enjoy. This is no criticism whatsoever of the plot, characters, writing style, setting, or the author. Merely a statement of my own preferences.

I really liked this book. I found the changing narrator a little distracting... but I always have that complaint. I especially liked the perspectives of Alia, Atef and Souad.
I wished for a little bit more about Palestine, but recognize that is a selfish wish, and the lack of discussion of historical foundation did not at all detract from the plot.

“We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

I can't even begin to imagine how it must feel to be faced with the fact that you can never return to your home. That most precious of places - a safe haven from all the madness that takes place in the big outside world. However, this is exactly what our family in 'Salt Houses' has to face when they are uprooted as a result of the Six Day War of 1967.

The story begins on the eve of Alia's wedding, when her mother Salma reads her daughter's future in the dregs of her coffee cup. Salma doesn't like what she sees, namely an unsettled life for Alia, but she decides to keep that knowledge to herself.

Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus and Alia and her husband move to Kuwait to start a new life albeit reluctantly. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, once again the family are uprooted and so the scene is set for this rich and colourful family.

The author allows us to follow this family through the generations, and paints a picture that is hard to witness. Displacement is a shocking thing to experience, to not belong anywhere. The family isn't perfect, there are the inevitable arguments, but it's wonderful to watch as they share grievances, laughter, celebrations, meals, and fears.

Let me just say that right now, I have a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes on finishing this book, I feel as if I've got to know this family, and Alia's husband Atef is a delight. This gentle man lives with guilt, but loves his whole family unconditionally, and it's so easy to love him. In some ways the family are better off than most, as they have the money to relocate each time, whereas others have to live in refugee camps in nothing more than a flimsy tent.

The author has done a splendid job of relating how it feels to be a displaced person, and just how cruel war really is. Insightful and heartbreaking.

*Thank you to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for my ARC in exchange for an honest review*