by Hala Alyan
First published 2025
Hala Alyan turns to surrogacy after years of miscarriages leave her unable to carry a child. As her baby develops in another woman's body in a distant country, Alyan's marriage crumbles and her mental health deteriorates. Beirut, the city where she spent her youth, falls apart around the same time. She responds by excavating her family's stories of displacement across Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon. Her grandmothers fled invading armies and crossed deserts at midnight, searching for refuge that never lasted. Alyan examines her own contradictory identity, shaped by a Midwestern childhood and years throughout the Arab world. She considers the men who abandoned their families and the women who vanished in subtler ways. While her baby grows from poppyseed to lime, Alyan sorts through inherited narratives, discarding some and preserving others. She grapples with how to love absent people and unreachable places, how to create safety for her child when she has never found it herself. The book traces her effort to build a sense of home from fragments of memory and story.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, memoir, biography-memoir, family-drama
Vibes: emotionally-raw, intimate, introspective, lyrical, meditative
Tropes: fragmented-narrative, inherited-stories, intergenerational-trauma
Setting: Beirut, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Midwest
Period: Contemporary
288 pages · Paperback · Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: depression, infertility, mental-illness, pregnancy-loss