I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love and inheritance.

As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unravelling a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Suria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities.

is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.