Salt Houses is a piercingly elegant novel that registers Palestine with deep resonance for what it is: a once beloved home, known, lost, and re-imagined into life. A place where families decide between security and happiness, religion and heritage, where war is constant, yet peace is found. In the exquisite prose of a poet, Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart.

A fiercely-told story of a family fleeing and rebuilding their lives.

Heartbreaking.

Hala Alyan's Salt Houses flies like a searchlight between history and fiction, unearthing the life of a single displaced Palestinian family among the rubble and illuminating it so deeply, so brilliantly, we cannot help but connect the story's richly imagined past to our very real present.

Upon finishing I was quite overwhelmed by the impact of what was a masterfully written exploration into the mystery of identity rooted in place, family and memory, and the opportunity for redemption and healing through new generations… A moving and skilfully executed novel, Alyan’s debut is well worth discovering.

Reading Salt Houses is like having your coffee grounds read: cosmic, foreboding and titillating all at once. In this magnificent debut, Alyan’s powerful and poetic voice guides us into the dark recesses of history and leads us right up to the present tensions between East & West, the modern & ancestral, the hopeless and the hopeful.

A striking debut of the disruptions and dispersals of exile, Salt Houses is a heartfelt portrait of the Palestinian diaspora. Powerful, lyrical, and deftly layered with multiple voices, Hala Alyan has done the near impossible: illuminated a half-century of wrenching history with great intimacy.

Salt Houses illuminates the heartache and permanent unsettledness experienced by refugees all over the world, reminding readers of the burdens and the blessings of home.

Lyrical . . . Heartbreaking . . . Important.

Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.

[This] remarkable debut novel . . .unfolds kaleidoscopically and elliptically, and to supremely good effect . . . [It] showcases [Alyan's] lyrical facility . . . [with] captivating prose that manages to be both tender and powerful.

The premise and its execution will grab readers and refuse to let go. An author to watch

With secrets and intrigue, this is a compulsive read

Entertaining

A darkly humorous story about friendship

Intrigue, hatred and accusations - phew, it kept me guessing to the end

Strout pierces the inner worlds of these characters' most private behaviors, illuminating the emotional conflicts and pure joy of being human, of finding oneself in the search for the American dream

Amgash, Illinois, will be familiar to Elizabeth Strout fans as the hometown of the protagonist of her 2016 novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. In Anything is Possible... Lucy's legend looms large... but no prior reading is required to enjoy Strout's powerful writing and empathy

We devoured Strout's last novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and her latest-which is loosely linked to Lucy Barton-is no different. Told from multiple points of view, it's about residents of a small town in Illinois struggling with the most relatable and quotidian problems... you'll swear you know these characters. (In fact, it reminds us a bit of another of Strout's masterpieces, the excellent Olive Kitteridge.)

Elizabeth Strout's prose is like words doing jazz

I am deeply impressed. Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue.

A powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships

Tender, elegiac, this is the story of a single life that also manages to tell the story of many

The writing is wrenchingly lovely. It almost always is with Strout, whether she's knitting metaphors or summarizing, with agonizing economy, whole episodes.

There are not many novelists out there producing writing as good as this

Down to every sentence, it's wise, touching and quietly powerful

As always, Strout treats even the most difficult characters with rare understanding. "It made me feel much less alone," says on reader of Lucy's memoir. The same will surely be said of Anything Is Possible

Gorgeous... Strout is in that special company of writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O'Nan and Richard Russo, who write simply about ordinary lives and, in so doing, make us readers see the beauty of both their worn and rough surfaces and what lies beneath

Highly enjoyable

A subtle, disturbing and touching book that is a miracle of wisdom and perception

A beautifully told story of small-town Americans dealing with big life issues

Utterly beautiful in the way that these characters were flawed to their core yet brimful of keeping it together no matter what...I loved it, there wasn't a moment when I didn't believe it.

In all her novels, including this one, "the kindness of strangers is a fierce sun than can pierce the cloud"

Every chapter has depth, nuances, restrained descriptions and luminous characterisation. A wonder of a book

Elizabeth Strout is a novelist in whose hands anything really is possible, and if you've yet to discover her, make this holiday the one you do

This glimmering, profound, beautiful novel is modern American writing at its best'

Just as understated and as full of horrifyingly elisions and surprising epiphanies as its predecessor

This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas

Strout turns her clear, incisive gaze on the intricacies and betrayals of small town life

Anything is Possible is predictably great because it's written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable - because it is written by Elizabeth Strout