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Your next favorite book
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by Deena Helm
In this lyrical debut, three generations of Palestinian women must put the haunting of their ancestral home to rest, before the secrets of the past drown them all. Our Cut of Salt is a powerful and intimate look at what it means to make a home, to lose it, and to return, only to find it irrevocably changed.
There is something haunting Nuhad's childhood home in Haifa. Cats avoid its perimeter, strange noises come from within, and residents have mysteriously vanished without a trace. Although Nuhad has not returned to her home since the Nakba in 1948, she always held a place for the house in her heart.
And, in return, the house did the same for her.
After Nuhad passes away, her granddaughter, Marina, is determined to visit her grandmother's home after a lifetime of being kept in the dark about her culture and family history. Marina's mother, Haifa - named for the city that was lost to their family - reluctantly agrees to her trip, though she knows firsthand that some secrets are better left buried.
But the house is no longer a home. It is a painful, festering wound that infects everything it touches. The more Marina digs into her family's past, the sicker she becomes. Despite Nuhad's ghostly warnings, Haifa rushes to help her daughter.
As the three women converge in their ancestral home, they must put the haunting to rest before the secrets of the past drown them all.
"Lyrical and haunting, Our Cut of Salt explores the horrors of occupation via the lens of three generations of women as well as a one-of-a-kind haunted house. A disturbing, mesmerizing read." ―Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
"Our Cut of Salt redefines the haunted house in the context of haunted history. Part Gothic horror, part family portrait, this is a haunting, gut-wrenching testament to the resilience of memory and the ghosts that survive through and alongside us." ―Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses
This information about Our Cut of Salt was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Deena Helm is a mixed Palestinian-American author, and Our Cut of Salt is her debut novel. Her other works can be found in Fikra Magazine and So To Speak. She asks that you, the reader, do everything in your power to resist genocide and deepen your commitment to liberation for all.
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