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*

Heart-breakingly real.

This is one of the best debut novels I've read in a while! This lyrical book focuses on a Palestinian family through several generations from the 1960s to present day. With the Six Day War and other political and military upheavals as the backdrop, we witness parts of this family seek new lives from Nablus, Amman, Beirut, Kuwait City, Paris, and Boston. This isn't the story of a typical group of refugees - this family is fortunate enough to have good jobs, a lovely home, enough money, and even housekeepers. However, like anyone in such pressing circumstances, they are not immune from the conflicts surrounding them.

Moving from place to place makes this cast of characters question their identities, especially when they're not in their own "home" with like-minded people. Post 9/11, they face criticism for their Arab background, even the younger generations that have never been to Palestine. Despite the hardships, they survive and thrive as a family. This book shows that even if you are at odds with the world and sometimes even each other, you will always have the support of family.

I always enjoy multi-generational tales, and this was no exception. The lush prose made this story more engaging - it's clear that the author is also a published poet! My only critique is that sometimes the book felt a little choppy. Each chapter focuses on a specific character in a certain year, and the gaps between years is substantial for every chapter. A few times I wanted to know what happened after different events. For instance, a character had a big crush on a boy as a teenager, but in the next chapter, she's grown and married to somebody completely different. This is more my preferences than the fault of the book, but I wanted to know what happened to him and why things turned out the way we did. Although, I guess it's never a bad thing to want to find out more when it comes to a book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the digital copy of this wonderful book!

In Palestine, Salma reads her daughter’s coffee dregs on the eve of her wedding, but only tells Alia part of what she foresees. The rest she will find out soon enough. Salt Houses, Hala Alyan’s debut novel, covers three family generations.

The first uprooting and loss comes with the Six Day War of 1967. The book follows the family through a series of relatively peaceful times intercepted by war for the next fifty years. Bit by bit and war by war, the family scatters to Kuwait City, Beirut, Paris, and Boston with different levels and approaches to how much they assimilate into their new cultures and how much they hold onto the old values and traditions.

She describes the war times – electricity cutting out every few hours, adults forbidding children to leave the house or even to go out on the balcony, men yelling at the television when it was on and shaking their heads, news reports with streaks of smoke from the airport, and planes dropping bombs “like eggs from their abdomens.”

In between, life resembles a normal pull and tug as children grow up wanting to stretch their wings and throw off old restrictions, as parents worry and disagree on how to handle the young ones, and as grandmother recalls the old ways or helps the young ones circumvent the rules. Normality lasts only until the next conflict.

The theme of the book is in a paragraph near the end. “What they say never changes. There is a war Alia knows. She understands this intuitively; in fact, it seems to her the only truth she holds immutable. There is a war. It is being fought and people are losing, though she is uncertain who exactly.”

Salt Houses sheds light on a question I’ve often asked when I’ve seen those reports of wars that seem interminable, “How do people live in that kind of atmosphere?” and puts a human face on what seems far away and can be forgotten once the newscast goes off.

An incredibly beautifully written story of one Palestinian family's fight for survival through the decades from around the 1950s to the present. It begins with the reading of coffee grounds from Mother, Salma to her daughter, Alia on the eve of Alia's wedding.

The future as it turns out isn't so bright for this family. There is so much turmoil and displacement from their home in Nablus to Kuwait, Lebanon and even in America. Politics, religion, and wars play crucial roles.

This story is a must for everyone. It had heart, great sadness and in the end it reaffirms that with love of family, goodness will always prevail.

This title will appear on the short list of books I'm recommending for our adult summer reading program, on the sub-theme "Beyond Borders" to the "Building a Better World" theme. I'm so excited to recommend it. The writing is divine, but even if it weren't, the characters would carry it. (They carry so much....) I wanted, selfishly, for more of the story to be set in Boston, where some of the characters briefly live, but I'm grateful to have been transported to cities I do not know and will likely never see: Beirut, Kuwait, Jaffa. The Alzheimer's plot thread is minor, but powerful.

There are plenty of times when fiction ventures into territory that is unfamiliar—in fact, that’s one of the reasons I love it so much. But Salt Houses, the debut novel from Hala Alyan is about a subject that I almost can’t wrap my mind around. The fact of having been driven out, by force or war, from not just your home, but virtually every country where you’ve settled. For Salma’s family this is their life. They are Muslims and in the span of fifty years they are pushed from Israel to the West Bank to Kuwait to Jordan to Lebanon. The novel passes through the years and the lives of Salma’s daughters and their daughters and their daughters as they move from country to country. Forced migration is the keystone of their family’s history as told by a member of each generation.

Before the novel begins Salma, her husband and their three children are forced out of their home in Israel due to the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Now it is 1963, they live in the West Bank and the youngest daughter, Alia, is getting married. Four years later and war has entered the West Bank and brought the death of Mustafa, Alia’s beloved brother and her husband’s best friend. This death will be an unexpected, but pivotal part of the family’s history. They split between Kuwait and Jordan, until Sadaam Hussein invades Kuwait and they move again. By the time the novel ends Salma’s great-granddaughters live in places like Boston and even Beirut. Some maintain their close ties to tradition, but for others the only movement is forward and the past is something to be forgotten.

What gives Salt Houses its intimacy is that the focus is not violence or the specifics of Middle Eastern conflict. Rather it is the constant struggle to retain a sense of self when one of the most basic premises of that sense—where am I from?—is lost. This could be enough to sink the novel but Alyan chooses to play it off against another foundational dynamic that can be just as shifting and hard to understand—the mother-daughter relationship. She balances the unfamiliar concept of displacement with an all-too familiar reality for a lot of us. For each generation there is the push and pull of tradition, with mothers trying to pass on values that many daughters are determined to rebel against. In this way, Alyan beautifully melds the universality of family relationships with the singularity of Muslims uprooted time and again from their homes. For those of us who have never had to contemplate leaving our home, friends and possessions behind it is a much needed glimpse into the plight of families who have no choice but to escape for their own safety and then must deal with being unwelcome outsiders wherever they go. Salt Houses left me weighted with sadness, but very glad I read it.

I'll not lie, it was the cover that drew me in and it makes me very sad that in the UK this isn't the edition that has been published, if it were I'd be snapping up a physical copy of this book because it was magnificent.

I don't even know where to begin with this book because it is that incredible. We start in Palestine, it's 1967 and the eve of a wedding. We follow the same family, from different viewpoints and perspectives, over several generations, several countries, and 3 continents from Palestine being torn apart by the Six-Day War. The family ends up spread across the world, and it's made even more relevant to this family as Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in the 90s; Kuwait being where some of the family set up a new home after the . How they feel living in America after 9/11. Ultimately though, this is about a family and the meaning of home. It's a book that explores displacement, loss, and it also explores a woefully unexplained part of history - the view from the other side.

All the characters in this book were vibrant; each had flaws but they were almost charming because they were so well rounded, they were believable. I can't talk about all the characters in this book because there are 5 generations by the epilogue - each of them as important as the last. I will say I had a soft spot for Atef, throughout the book he put up with a lot, and it's only through the course of the novel that you realise quite how much.

As I said, this explores a very underrepresented portion of the population. The loss of identity for the children and grandchildren of Alia and Atef puts in to words what the horror what was 9/11 and being of Arabian heritage in the USA. Some parts of this book really broke my heart, and frankly it disgusts me that there are still so many ignorant people in the world.

The thing that stands out most about this book is the family is so normal. They're ordinary. In spite of their atypical experience, so much about them as a unit was just them being a family, arguments and all, in spite of the horrors going on around them. They're just people, a family, trying to get along in the world and find their place in it.

Alyan is a poet and that shines through in this book. For me this book was so rich; the prose was incredible, the scene building was amazing, and I was absolutely lost in wherever in the world we were in that particular chapter. Her writing is absolutely beautiful, and I'm looking forward to reading some of her poetry because if this was a taster of her work, the rest is going to be incredible.

I'm so glad I read this right now, but I have to admit I think this is a perfect sunny day, outside, read. This book made me feel like I would on a mid-summer evening, and I think reading it with that around me really would have heightened the reading experience for me. While it's covering some really harrowing and heartbreaking history, it's probably one of the most uplifting books I've read in a while. I'd highly recommend it to anyone.

...4.5 Stars. A wonderful Palestinian family saga evolves decade by decade taking the reader from one side of the world to the other, from one culture to another beginning with the happiness of young love and marriage in a land most loved through sadness and loss, and the devastation of war with recurring displacement.

...Most memorable for me, though, won't be the difficult times, but the beautifully descriptive scenery of a place I have little knowledge, the interspersion of life-changing historical events, and finding that despite major cultural disparity, our family lives are not so different after all.

...SALT HOUSES is an insightful debut novel....its focus on family and memories.

...Many thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

4.5 I have thought about this book on and off for the last day or so. Such a wonderful family, displaced people, living in countries not of their birth. Displaced by war, in Iraq, Kuwait, Arabs who try to find a home. We follow this family through generations, chapters devoted to different family members and my favorite from the beginning was Atef. This man who marries Alia, a woman he loves very much, but he is consumed by so much guilt, a quiet man who has so much hope in his family, their lives. This family will eventually be dispersed, some in Paris, Boston, Lebanon, a family divided by circumstances often beyond their control. They are though luckier than many as they have the money to relocate, not having to live in tents in a refugee camp.

What I was thinking though was how hard it is to live in a country you are unfamiliar with, to heaving to adjust again and again, to, watch your children settle elsewhere. That they only want what we all want, a home, safety, their children close, a place where they are wanted, belong. They worry over their children, their marriages, what they will eat, they laugh, cry, get angry, are sad when they cannot connect with their family. Lastly, some pass on and some get sick, but in the end family is family and so it proves in this story. Yes, it is indeed a story but very real too I believe, honest and thoughtful and about a subject the author herself knows well. Indeed these people are like is and I can't help thinking that if people would pay more attention to the things that make us the same instead of the things that make us different, that just maybe there would not be these constant wars. naïve probably, but as you can see this book gave me much to think about.

ARC from publisher.

A beautiful and harrowing multi-generational tale about one family's sojourn through the Mid-East once they are forced from their ancestral home in Jaffa in 1967. With each subsequent attempt at securing safety, politics shift and once again the family is forced to uproot and flee to another location. Along the way, their sense of identity shifts as new family members, by marriage, reflect their new locations. The family has wealth, allowing them a level of movement and access not available to many refugees; yet leaving them uncertain if they should have resisted before they fled. The one time they did had catastrophic consequences. The historic and multi-generational sweep of the novel make it truly memorable. The author is fantastically gifted and this book is not to be missed. It takes a highly charged political arena and brings it to a personal/family level; making the political personal in a way that cannot be ignored or minimized. All while telling an amazing tale. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

There’s something about Salt Houses that worked perfectly for me. It’s a multi-generational story about a family originally from Palestine, displaced and scattered, but that remains strongly united over the years. The story is told from the alternating points of view of a few family members across three generations, starting in 1967 up to today. Each lengthy chapter picks up a few years after the previous chapter, but flits back and forth in time, catching us up on what happened in the last few years. The points of view are deeply subjective, immersing us into these characters’ idiosyncratic understanding of their lives and their place in the family. The women in particular resonated for me. This is not a dysfunctional family, but it is a family of strong personalities -- full of love but with lots of jagged edges. The writing is beautiful – expressive but crisp. I loved the sense of place and the way in which recent history is woven through the story. The theme of dislocation is familiar, but Salt Houses treats it with more subtlety and finesse than many books I have read. Highly recommended. One of my fiction favourites so far this year. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for advance copies. And thanks to Angela and Diane for another excellent buddy read.

4.5 stars

A displaced family, a multigenerational story of their lives over decades in the various places they move to - from Jaffa to Kuwait to Amman to Paris and Boston . A Palestinian family, the Yacoubs, a family of means is not unscathed by the wars and the politics of the places in which they live because they live comfortably. It affords them the ability to leave their home when they have to insure their safety but it doesn't insulate them from the deep emotional consequences of being displaced. These are not the refugees that we read about in the news and see on tv news casts living in tents and starving. This is not a story that primarily focuses on the ravages of the wars, but on how the displacement from their home and from the places they call home affects who they are, how they live. I was taken right from the beginning by the writing and I loved reading about the customs, how the children and then the grandchildren resist the traditions, how the future evolved with them. I really like the multiple points of view with alternating chapters of some of the family members.

The sense of loss, of identity for the children and grandchildren of Alia and Atef depicts what so many people must have felt like after 9/11, how they were treated because of where they were born. "Souad felt the clerks' gaze - two young Midwestern men, eyes like icepicks - on them the entire time. One of the men flung the change at her, several coins falling to the ground. Souad's fear was like a bell waking her. As they were leaving, she caught the words terrorist and bitch and a burst of laughter." And Linah , the next generation, feeling confused and is speechless when a girl in school says, "You think your people deserve to be here? My mom told me all about them. Palestinians killed my uncle during the war."

While their experience is not typical, I loved that so much about them felt typical- the teenagers especially. What I loved most was how the family all comes together. I loved the family dynamics, loved that the children and grandchildren came to know who they were even though only one of the grandchildren gets to go the place where the family begins - depicted in a beautiful scene by the sea. The one thing that was a little bothersome and perhaps the reason for taking off a half star was that I was confused at times in the earlier chapters when time frames of the past and present in a single chapter were not clear. Having said that I found the most beautiful writing in the book in the last few chapters and the epilogue. Hala Aylan's poetic talent is reflected in her beautiful prose and moving scenes. Definitely recommended.
Another great read along with Diane and Esil.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt through NetGalley.

This is a very beautifully written and told piece of fiction, with a lot of historical facts. We follow four generations of a Palestinian family, from the 1960's to present day, starting off in Jaffa, then Nablus, they will then move to Kuwait City, Amman, Beirut, some to France and the USA, yet always returning to their roots and family when they could.
We go through their struggles as they experience other upheavals in the other location they have moved to, we feel the tension of the area, how each of these characters react to the situations, or how involved they are in them. It was an interesting and educational way to see and feel these conflicts, through this families eyes.
The other part of the story is a very universal one, one which relates to all of us. Where one goes through the normal sequence of conflict between parent and child, sibling differences, and their want of Independence, which is such a universal challenge for us all. A testament that despite our political views, our ways of seeing the world, our traditions, actions, etc. we are all basically the same. Something that we should never forget.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC of this book.
I really look forward to more stories by this author.

Interesting story that looks at several generations in an Arab family, and how the changes in the region and world shape their lives.

Another good book for these days, giving a voice to a people and problem that can seem far away to many of us

Salt Houses was an interesting look at a family's trials and tribulations in the Middle East over a span of five decades. Political turmoil and a network of family meant they had to spread far and wide to find the meaning of home.

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971664-salt-houses" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Salt Houses" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474820735m/30971664.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30971664-salt-houses">Salt Houses</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6483825.Hala_Alyan">Hala Alyan</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1882821627">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
4.5<br />This is a beautiful story about a Palestinian family uprooted from their home in Nablus in 1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War.<br />The story begins with a mother named Salma reading her daughter Alia's future in a cup of coffee dregs on the eve of her wedding, and follows this family through their displacement to Kuwait. In 1990 they lose everything again and scatter to Beirut, Paris, and the United States. <br />We will see this family grow, Alia's children, grandchildren, and follow their heartbreaks and blessings. <br /><br />Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, author Hala Allan, and NetGalley for this advanced copy!
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12851291-karen">View all my reviews</a>

Insightful and emotional! In Salt Houses the relations and connections Alyan describes will show everyone how no matter what differences may appear on the surface we are all similar sharing the same hopes, fears, loves and joys.