The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga. In Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of not just a nation--Lebanon and Syria--but also the United States. It's a rich family story that gives a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home.

The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. With a Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children, they have all lived a life of migration. Yet, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. However, following his father's recent death, Idris, the new patriarch, has decided to sell. This decision brings the family to Beirut, where they unite against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, these secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold the family together.

In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us that fiction often provides the best filter for the real world around us.

Station Eleven, an audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition, is set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. Day One: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. Week Two: Civilization has crumbled.

Year Twenty: A band of actors and musicians, known as the Travelling Symphony, move through the territories of a changed world, performing concerts and Shakespeare at the settlements that have formed. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and it threatens the world every hopeful survivor has tried to rebuild.

Moving backward and forward in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: celebrated actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan, a bystander warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife, Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend, Clark; Kirsten, an actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed "prophet."

Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the fragility of life, the relationships that sustain us, and the beauty of the world as we know it.