Our Cut of Salt is a haunted house novel about a Palestinian family separated from their family home. Nuhad was forced to leave her childhood home in Haifa in 1948 and never got to return. After her death, her granddaughter Marina, who has grown up in the US, wants to visit her grandmother’s home and find out more about her family, whilst Marina’s mother Haifa fears that her daughter shouldn’t visit the city Haifa was named for. When Marina gets there, she learns that her family’s old house is haunted, with its residents disappearing, and that her grandmother was hiding secrets of what happened in Haifa.
There’s so much to say about the haunted house genre and what it can be used to communicate, and Our Cut of Salt offers a timely, horrifying take on the haunted house by asking what if the trauma of a family’s history is embodied in their home? It is a powerful way to tell the story of Palestine and of a family that had the concept of home taken from them. These messages in the book aren’t subtle—the house is even a voice within the book—but I found that was what made it particularly visceral.
Despite being a haunted house book, the horror comes from the horrors of what has happened and what continues to happen in Palestine, making this a book that works for horror fans interested in the haunted house genre and also anyone wanting to read about legacies of trauma in Palestinian families even without an interest in haunted houses.
Fiendfully Reading 
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