Salt Houses is a novel deeply focused on the impact of diaspora and displacement on individuals and families, and as such, it relegates much of its historical grounding to the background. This is not to say that history, especially that of war and conflict, is not important within the novel’s narrative structure. Quite the opposite is true, as all of the events of this novel are in some way the result of the history of conflict in both Palestine and the broader Middle East. Because Alyan is so interested in the psychological, human impact of war, she foregrounds the experiences of the Yacoub family rather than of the various conflicts that shape their lives and migration trajectories, but an understanding of each of the main conflicts that underpin the narrative is helpful to make sense of the way that the experiences of the Yacoubs are representative of the Palestinian diaspora, writ large.

The event that first displaces the Yacoub family from their ancestral home takes place in 1948 and is referred to by Palestinians as “The Nakba,” Arabic for the Catastrophe. The Yacoub family is living in Nablus at the beginning of the narrative, but their roots are in Jaffa, where they owned a large orange grove.