Salt Houses

Salt Houses

Author: Hala Alyan

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0544912381

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Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award A Best Book of the Year: NPR • NYLON • Kirkus • Bustle • BookPage "What does home mean when you no longer have a house—or a homeland? This beautiful novel traces one Palestinian family's struggle with that question and how it can haunt generations. . . . This is an example of how fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us." — NPR 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. 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 and their land, 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. Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand.


The Time Trials

The Time Trials

Author: Jon McConnell

Publisher: Tiny Fox Press

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13:

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“Four players. It’s in the rules.” “Is this like, some sort of academic decathlon or something?” “Something like that.” Walkman-toting, guitar-playing Finn Mallory blames himself for his parents’ deaths and would do anything to turn back time and set things right. So, when he’s recruited into a secret club at his new school that specializes in competitive time travel games, Finn sees a world of opportunity open before him. The games, however, are far from benign. Competition is cutthroat. Scenarios are rigged. And the mysterious timekeepers who organize it all have no qualms about using—or disposing of—players to suit their own sinister plans. Now Finn must decide who he can trust while making peace with his past if he’s to have any hope of leading his team to victory and surviving his junior year. As the games commence, it’s time to press rewind.


Attachments

Attachments

Author: Jeff Arch

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1684630827

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2022 16th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards Winner in Regional Fiction: Northeast 2022 16th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist in New Fiction 2022 International Book Awards Finalist in Best New Fiction and Fiction: General A 2021 Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Book of the Year “[A] really clever plot….and Arch works it like a maestro. Fine writing, memorable characters, depth of feeling, and gripping drama—a real keeper.” —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED At a boarding school in Pennsylvania, a deathbed request from the school’s dean brings three former students back to campus, where secrets and betrayals from the past are brought out into the open—secrets that could have a catastrophic effect on the dean’s eighteen-year-old son. Told in alternating points of view and time frames, Attachments is the story of best friends Stewart (“Goody”) Goodman, Sandy (“Pick”) Piccolo, and Laura Appleby, the girl they both love. The friends meet in 1972 at a boarding school in coal-country Pennsylvania where they encounter Henry Griffin, the school dean, whose genuine fatherly interest and deep human bond with them is so strong that when he has a severe stroke almost twenty years later, he uses what could be his last words ever to call out their names. Attachments is a puzzle—and the only one who knows how all the pieces fit is in a coma. In the process, longtime secrets are unearthed, revelations come out into the open, and Young Chip Griffin is about to learn something he may or may not be able to handle.


Outside Looking In

Outside Looking In

Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1526604655

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One family's adventures in LSD: the brilliantly strange new novel from the mind of 'one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today' (Lionel Shriver) Chosen as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Herald It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off campus, Dr Timothy Leary plays host for his PhD students, laying on a spread of cocktails, pizza and LSD. Among the guests is Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology student, and his librarian wife Joanie. Married young, and both diligently and unglamorously toiling to support their son, they are not the sort of people one would expect to be seduced by the nascent drug culture. But their nights on LSD prove so extraordinary - so revelatory, so earth-shattering, so downright seductive - that Fitzhugh and Joanie are soon captive to the whims of the charismatic and subversive Dr Tim. Follow Fitzhugh and Joanie on their quest for transcendence, as sultry Mexican nights at Hotel Catalina give way to a ramshackle mansion in upstate New York, where thirty devotees - students, wives and children - play out the final act of a terrible, beautiful experiment. Join us, won't you? It's going to be one hell of a trip.