Modern Voices Reading and Discussion Group
The Modern Voices Reading and Discussion Group was created by popular demand from readers who want to participate in a daytime group. Modern Voices meets monthly on the third Tuesday at noon in the meeting room of the main library. The group reads and discusses books of all kinds, including fiction and nonfiction. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion. Bring your lunch or indulge in one of the treats provided by the Friends of the Albany Library.
Salt Houses, by Hala Alyan
Join us on Tuesday,
November 20 @ noon
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.
About the Author
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in Guernica and other literary journals. her poetry collection ATRIUM was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, while her latest collection, HIJRA, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and published by Southern Illinois University Press. She is a Lannan fellow and currently resides in Brooklyn.