Hala Alyan's Salt Houses flies like a searchlight between history and fiction, unearthing the life of a single displaced Palestinian family among the rubble and illuminating it so deeply, so brilliantly, we cannot help but connect the story's richly imagined past to our very real present. - Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalkers' Guide to Dancing Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between security and happiness, religion and heritage, where war is constant, yet peace is found. In the exquisite prose of a poet, Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart. -Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane As accomplished a poet as she is in her excellent collections of poems, Hala Alyan exceeds those measures of brilliance in her moving, deeply felt, powerfully realized first novel, Salt Houses . I can't think of many writers, older or younger, who have so adeptly written of family relationships - spanning five generations here, between all manner of older and younger, between siblings, cousins - all, at different ages and stages of life, and all against a vividly rendered backdrop of exile and migration. From Palestine to Jordan, Lebanon to Kuwait, Boston to New York, and back to Palestine again, this is a story of people losing, finding, and making their way. Salt Houses gives voice, body, and love to people whose lives in this country tend, at most, to be featured anonymously in news accounts - and at that, in the negative. This is real life, beautifully written, graciously enlarging the sense of who we are. -Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company