Global Perspectives is a group devoted to exploring history and looking at diverse perspectives through fiction.  The program is held monthly on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from February-October 2026 at 6pm in the Carnegie Library meeting room. We alternate between discussing a book one month to viewing a movie the next month throughout the series. Be sure to email arobertson@munpl.org if you would like to join our email list.

This Month's Book:

This month, we will read Salt Houses by Hala Alyan, a novel set in the Middle East during the Six-Day War of 1967. 

Synopsis from Goodreads:

On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.  

Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities.  

Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand—one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again.