Description
ISBN: 9781849251006
Year: 2026
Publisher: Saqi Books
Description:
At first, Hala's baby is the size of a poppyseed. Then a grain of rice, then a lime. After years of trying for a baby, with one miscarriage followed by another, Hala watches from afar as her daughter grows in the body of another woman, in another country.
Halais not just awaiting news from the surrogate. She is also holding her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire. She goes for long runs to distract herself. She remembers family stories of grandmothers mapping their lives through a tangle of borders; of eradicated villages, invading armies and places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men who left, women who stayed, and the legacies passed down from one to another.Haladecides to name her unborn child Leila, a thread connecting her daughter toThe Thousand and One Nightsand the women who save by storytelling.
A stunningly lyrical and honest quest for motherhood and peoplehood,I'll Tell You When I'm Homeis a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.
'A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page.' Naomi Klein
'A roaring cyclone of memory and imagination and harrowing tribulation. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile. Exile not as a dream for a better life, but as concession, a begrudging necessity. Gaza, San Miguel, Beirut, New York, Damascus traveling with Alyan's prose is a thrill. I'll Tell You When