Hala Alyan
Paperback, 320 pages
9780099510932

‘A piercingly elegant novel with the power to both break and mend your heart.’ Ru Freeman

Where do you go when you cant go home? On the eve of her daughter Alias wedding, Salma reads the girls 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, Alias 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, Alias children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.