“[A] gorgeous, lyrical memoir … shows the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland, the violence of colonisation.” The New York Times
Over the years, Hala Alyan and her relatives have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, Kuwait, and Lebanon. After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriages, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. She watches from afar as her daughter grows in the body of another woman, in another country, and holds her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire.
Hala Alyan is a writer and poet whose novels include The Arsonists’ City and Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a Chautauqua Prize finalist. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and Guernica. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and an NPR Book of the Year.