Hala Alyan

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, Hala watches from afar as her daughter grows in the body of another woman, in another country.

Hala is not just awaiting news from the surrogate. She also holds her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire. 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.

Stunningly lyrical and unflinchingly honest, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of homelands lost and reimagined, and of the intimate ways we learn to make a life when the ground beneath us shifts.

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