Review: Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
What: Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Who: Harper
When: May 2 2017
How: Borrowed from library.
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.
Salt Houses is a multigenerational story about a Palestinian family, beginning in the 1960’s and ending in 2014. The majority of the Yacoub family have chapters, and this made the bond between me and the family all the more deep.
The displacement the Yacoub family faced at the hands of the zionist entity, first during the Nakba, again during the Naksa, and the denial of the right of return is incredibly painful and saddening to read about. Those words really pale in comparison to how the continued displacement after the family had been forced out of Palestine tore at my heart. One character in particular lived through all of them and I just wanted her to be able to build a home and live in it forever. Palestinians should not be forced to leave their homes, their belongings, their memories, behind. It is cruel and unjust.
From the very first sentence of Salt Houses, I was completely drawn into the Yacoub’s world. Alyan’s writing is some of the most engaging that I have had the pleasure to read in quite a while. I found myself reading late into the night to see which family member was going to narrate the next chapter, and what new aspects of each character I was going to learn about.
One of the best elements of Salt Houses was the beautiful imperfection of all the characters. None of them are perfect, and none of them pretend to be. They fight, they let each other down, they make mistakes. But in the end they always come back together and to each other and that is another aspect of this family’s, and this book’s, beauty. The strong, unbreakable bonds between the characters.
Each chapter of Salt Houses was almost like its own story, but this didn’t make it feel disjointed at all, because each chapter was a window into that character’s person that the reader hadn’t seen before. And you also learned more about the family members who’d narrated previously, which built upon their character and relationship development as well.
Salt Houses was an incredible book that highlights the resilience and strength of a Palestinian family, and is an absolute must read.
Our mutiny is remembering.
© 2025, Chiara @ Books for a Delicate Eternity. All rights reserved.
trigger warning racism, islamophobia, colonisation, genocide, displacement, death, torture (recounted), war, character with dementia, sexual violence, murder
