Werezi Books

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and Electric Lit's Best Nonfiction of 2025The rich and deeply personal debut memoir of motherhood via surrogacy, by award-winning Palestinian-American poet and novelist Hala Alyan.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2026

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and Electric Lit''s Best Nonfiction of 2025

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, 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 also holds her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire. 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.

Stunningly lyrical and unflinchingly honest, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of homelands lost and reimagined, and of the intimate ways we learn to make a life when the ground beneath us shifts.

‘A powerful, magnificently haunting memoir from a writer I always want to read. It’s great luck to live in a time when Hala Alyan is writing. Get ready to be astonished.’

‘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.''

‘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.’

‘I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is an exquisitely written and unforgettable memoir about what it means to live with the violence and theft of exile and one woman’s devotion to restoring her daughter’s inheritance through the power of narrative.’

‘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.''

‘This memoir of pregnancy loss and surrogacy is frantic, intimate, brutal, tender and beautiful. Over the arc of a pregnancy by surrogate, the poet offers up her fragmented heartbreak and kaleidoscopic life. I kept gasping, wanting to close in around Hala, to protect her across time and space from the sharp edges of mother-need inside a body that cannot birth a living baby. She wants her readers in the wound with her, inside the stories that don’t get told enough, inside the body-mind of a displaced woman struggling to create something bigger than herself. Brilliant.’

‘Hala Alyan writes with sinew and tender force as she masterfully braids the delicate filaments that make a self –body, home, labor, loss – in such a way that the reader can never again disentangle them. This book is a gift, an offering of abundant beauty, full of deep insight into the intricacies of motherhood.’

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

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