Hala Alyan reads from her novel _Salt Houses_ as part of the Transnational Literature Series. Salt Houses is her first novel. 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.
**Hala Alyan** is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including \_The Missouri Review\_, \_Prairie Schooner\_ and \_Colorado Review\_. Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She is the author of three poetry collections and has been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship. She resides in Brookyln with her husband. Photo: [HalaAlyan.com](https://halaalyan.com/bio/ "Hala Alyan")