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, with one miscarriage followed by another, 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 is also holding her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire. She goes for long runs to distract herself. 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. Hala decides to name her unborn child Leila, a thread connecting her daughter to The Thousand and One Nights and the women who save by storytelling. A stunningly lyrical and honest quest for motherhood and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated
