Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR * Nylon * Kirkus Reviews * Bustle * BookPage "Moving and beautifully written." -- Entertainment Weekly 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 asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again. "[Alyan is] a master." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "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

'A piercingly elegant novel . . . with the power to both break and mend your heart.' Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane 'Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.' Red Where do you go when you can't go home? On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia's brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia's children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.

"This is the stuff of life, the very essence of the poetic." -LitHub For Hala Alyan, twenty-nine is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past--memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith--winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife. This collection summons breathtaking chaos, one that seeps into the bones of these odes, the shape of these elegies. A vivid catalog of heartache, loneliness, love and joy, The Twenty-Ninth Year is an education in looking for home and self in the space between disparate identities.

In Atrium, award-winning Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan traces lines of global issues in personal spaces, with fervently original imagery, and a fierce passion and intense intimacy that echoes long after initial reading.
The book received the 2013 Arab American Book of the Year Award for Poetry, an astounding achievement for a first collection. In addition, Alyan was recently tapped as a finalist in the Nazim Himet Poetry Competition.
Already in her young career, Alyan has etched her mark on other award-winning poets who are universal in their praise: "Don't miss the dazzling Hala Alyan. Wow. When she says 'the poetry like a spear, ' she isn't kidding." --Naomi Shihab Nye; "Hala Alyan's poems startle us with their beautiful, enigmatic images and capture us with their passionate engagement with the world. A powerful debut." --Chitra Divakaruni; "For all the stunning angularity in this vision, we do not doubt that what we are seeing and sensing here is a surprising, sharp-edged sense of the real, of a world that had been there all along, just waiting for this poet and these poems to reveal. Start to finish, these poems convey a singular vision and represent an important new voice in the international poetry arena." --Fred Marchant
Hala Alyan's Atrium is truly a remarkable debut by a poet of stunning virtuosity and range.