Elif Shafak - Honour (Penguin, 2012) ***

This is the third novel I read by British author Elif Shafak, after "There Are Rivers In The Sky" (Penguin, 2025) and "10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World" (Penguin, 2020). 

"Honour" gives again a kaleidoscopic narrative in different times (1961 and 1977/1978) and places (London and a "place near river Euphrates"), and many narrators who tell the events in the story each from their perspective, including letters from jail. Esma Toprak, a London-bred Turkish Kurd, goes to Shrewsbury Prison to collect her brother, who has just served a 14-year term for the murder of their mother, as a means to protect the family honour.

The story starts in a Kurdish village where two baby girls are born, "Pembe Kader and Jamila Yeter - Pink Destiny and Enough Beauty. Who could tell that one of these names would some day be printed in newspapers all around the world"? Both twin sisters have different characters, the one more introvert, the other more adventurous, one stays in the village and become a midwife, the other moves to London in the hope of offering her children a better future. 

As time evolves, relationships build, careers develop, and the generations follow one another. Shafak creates a whole family universe with all its complexities, frustrations, setbacks and friendships. To her credit, each character has a justifiable perspective, and even Iskender, who is in jail, has a voice that is worth hearing, caught up as he was in the old traditional code of honour that sometimes results in violence and death. 

Shafak starts the book with this paragraph: "When I was seven years old, we lived in a green house. One of our neighbours, a talented tailor, would often beat his wife. In the evenings, we listened to the shouts, the cries, the swearing. In the morning, we went on with our lives as usual. The entire neighbourhood pretended not to have heard, not to have seen."

She takes a stand against domestic violence and mindless honour codes. In the novel, she lets her characters speak. Of the three novels I have read by her, this is not the one that I liked most, primarily because she gives too much detail, too many words that drown the progress of the narrative.