I'll Tell You When I'm Home

Hala Alyan | Hard Cover | January 2026 

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.

Hala is 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. Hala decides to name her unborn child Leila, a thread connecting her daughter to The Thousand and One Nights and the women who save by storytelling.

A stunningly lyrical and honest quest for motherhood and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is 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 I'm Home feels as rich and supersaturated as contemporary consciousness itself – I can’t stop talking about it.’ – Kaveh Akbar

‘Gorgeously written and compelling, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home connects the threads of personal and family histories as its author prepares for motherhood. Hala Alyan is a writer of astounding talent.' – Lisa Ko

‘A story of the violence of exile over generations, a profound desire for motherhood, as well as surrogacy, addiction and the importance of remembering...a story of war and loss – of country, but also of friends, lovers and ultimately her marriage...questioning and lyrical.’ – The Guardian

‘[A] gorgeous, lyrical memoir...I’ll Tell You When I’m Home shows the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland, the violence of colonisation.' – The New York Times Book Review

'[A] lyrical memoir that explores the trauma of fractured identity.' – Los Angeles Times

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Author Info

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.