Arsonists' City
About This Book
The Arsonists' City is a novel by Hala Alyan, who also wrote Salt Houses, winner of the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Alyan is also a poet and clinical psychologist. The Nasr family is scattered across Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin and the California desert. The parents are a Syrian mother and a Lebanese father, and their three children grew up American, so migration has defined all of their lives. Through it all, the family's ancestral home in Beirut has stayed a fixed point, along with the messy, complicated love that holds them together. After his father's recent death, Idris, the new head of the family, decides to sell the house. The decision pulls everyone back to Beirut, where they join forces against him to save it. Each of them carries secrets such as lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions and deep shame, which distance had helped to bury. Beirut is a city still smoldering from the legacy of war, marked by a continuing flow of refugees, religious tension and political protest. In that setting the secrets ignite and threaten the fragile bonds keeping the family intact. The story traces their allegiances and betrayals across decades and continents.
ISBN: 9780358125099
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