Review: I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

Author: Hala Alyan

Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025

ISBN: 9781982182588 (hardcover)
9781982182601 (eBook)

$38.99 CAD (hardcover)
$20.99 CAD (EPUB)

272 pages

Ages: Adult

In this deeply moving memoir, Hala Alyan reckons with her family, her history and her future as she embarks on a surrogacy journey to motherhood. In each chapter, through the stages of her surrogate Dee’s pregnancy from preconception to postpartum, Alyan weaves her present with fragments of her memories of the people and places that she carries with her. Like Scheherazade, she recounts stories about her family’s continuous exile and displacement from Palestine and Syria to Lebanon and the United States, her youth marked by alcoholism, the unbearable pain of repeating miscarriages and her fraying marriage, the anticipation and uncertainty of waiting for the child she has wanted more than anything in the world. Alyan’s braided narrative is both poetic and unflinchingly honest. Reflexive, profoundly personal and beautifully written, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a stunning literary feat sure to both break readers’ hearts and put them back together again.