Salt Houses by Hala Alyan; 2018. Hardcover.

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. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses follows three generations of a Palestinian family and as they scatter across the globe, and brings us to a greater understanding of how “we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam” (Ru Freeman).

“Beautiful . . . An example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us.” — NPR “Gorgeous and sprawling . . . Heart-wrenching, lyrical and timely.” — Dallas Morning News “[Salt Houses] illustrate[s] the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter.” — New York Times Book Review