Hala Alyan's sophomore novel, The Arsonists' City, is a heartfelt and moving family saga that spans both generations and continents.
The Nasr family has always had a family home in Beirut, even as generations of Nasrs have moved across the world: Mazna, born in Syria, and Idris, in Lebanon, now live in California, their adult children scattered in Brooklyn, Austin and Beirut. But when Idris's father dies and Idris decides to sell his family home, three generations of relatives descend on the house to try to talk him out of it--or maybe talk themselves into it. The resultant piling-on is as emotional (and occasionally hilarious) as one would expect, with long-buried secrets and tightly held grudges brought to the surface, testing bonds of parent and child, brother and sister, friend and lover.
Alyan (Salt Houses) is an excellent storyteller; the many threads of the Nasr family's history are all tightly woven through The Arsonists' City, and the characters across its pages are fully developed, complex and familiarly imperfect. That alone would be enough to set The Arsonists' City apart from other epic family sagas, but the novel becomes something even larger in Alyan's capable hands: an exploration of the legacy of war and violence, the decisions people make to survive and the lies they tell themselves--and those they love--to accept those decisions. "We don't choose what we belong to," writes Alyan. "What claims us." But with The Arsonists' City, she does raise questions about what we choose to do with that belonging, and what power lies in the mere fact of claiming--by a people, by a place, or both. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm