Book - I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and Electric Lit’s Best Nonfiction of 2025

At first, Hala’s baby is the size of a poppy seed. Then a grain of rice, then a lime. After years of trying for a child, she watches from afar as her daughter grows in the body of another woman, in another country.

As she waits for news from the surrogate, Hala also holds her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, come under fire. She recalls family stories of lives mapped through shifting borders: erased villages, invading armies and temporary refuges; of men who left, women who stayed, and the legacies passed between them.

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.

About the Author

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer and poet. Her novels include The Arsonists' City and Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a Chautauqua Prize finalist. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.