Buy Used
£0.01
+ £2.80 UK delivery
Used: Very Good | Details
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comment: This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See more of our deals.

Have one to sell?
Flip to back Flip to front
Listen Playing... Paused   You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more
See this image

Honour Paperback – 5 Apr 2012

4.1 out of 5 stars 77 customer reviews

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions
Amazon Price
New from Used from
Kindle Edition
"Please retry"
Paperback, 5 Apr 2012
£5.00 £0.01

Top Deals in Books
See the latest top deals in Books. Shop now
Available from these sellers.
click to open popover

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

  • Apple
  • Android
  • Windows Phone

To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number.



Top Deals in Books
See the latest top deals in Books. Shop now

Product details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Viking (5 April 2012)
  • ISBN-10: 0670921157
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670921157
  • Product Dimensions: 15.3 x 2.5 x 23.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 478,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Product Description

Review

Colourfully woven and beguilingly intelligent (Daily Telegraph)

A powerful book; thoughtful, provoking and compassionate (Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat)

A gorgeous, jewelled, luxurious book (The Times)

Rich and wide as the Euphrates river along whose banks it begins and ends, Elif Shafak has woven with masterful care and compassion one immigrant family's heartbreaking story - a story nurtured in the terrible silences between men and women trying to grow within ancient ways, all the while growing past them. I loved this book (Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress)

Elif Shafak tells stories of great urgency, heart, and intellectual acuity. Honour is a powerful tale of family connection and heartbreak, offering us insight and delight in equal measure. This is a compulsively readable novel, an exquisite and deep rendering of the fullness of life. (Aurelie Sheehan, author of The Anxiety of Everyday Objects)

Shafak will challenge Paulo Coelho's dominance (The Independent)

An honour killing is at the centre of this stunning novel... Exotic, evocative and utterly gripping (The Times)

Lushly and memorably magic-realist... This is an extraordinarily skilfully crafted and ambitious narrative (The Independent)

The book calls to mind The Color Purple in the fierceness of its engagement with male violence and its determination to see its characters to a better place. But Shafak is closer to Isabel Allende in spirit, confidence and charm. Her portrayal of Muslim cultures, both traditional and globalising, is as hopeful as it is politically sophisticated. This alone should gain her the world audience she has long deserved (The Guardian)

In Honour, Shafak treats an important, absorbing subject in a fast-paced, internationally familiar style that will make it accessible to a wide readership (Sunday Times)

Fascinating and gripping - a wonderful novel (Rosamund Lupton, author of Sister)

Vivid storytelling... that explores the darkest aspects of faith and love (Sunday Telegraph)

Moving, subtle and ultimately hopeful, Honour is further proof that Shafak is the most exciting Turkish novelist to reach western readers in years (Irish Times)

About the Author

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.


What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Related Media

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Doha VINE VOICE on 16 May 2012
Format: Paperback Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Honour opens with Iskender's release from prison.

What follows is a sad and strange alternation of pasts and present, chronicling the lives of the members of the Toprak family, and anyone connected to them: Pembe and Adem, their children - charismatic Iskender, rebellious Esma, and reserved and thoughtful Younus; their parents and their childhood, their children's adulthoods, their mistakes and their tragedies, happinesses and despair, triumphs and failures - all of it is contained in these 352 pages.

Everything leads up to or away from 30th November, 1978 - the day Iskender Toprak commits a horrifying crime. It spans decades and miles, leaping from point to point in space and time, yet always coming back to that fateful day - how did it happen, why did it happen? Who is really responsible? How does a status quo so ruthlessly cut down its victims? Who *are* the victims, or is everyone complicit, a perpetrator? I think what best sums up what underlies this book is what Shafak writes, that 'men have honour - women have shame'.

It's such a nuanced and careful writing of the cultural backdrop - doing justice not only to Eastern culture (in this case Turkish and Kurdish), but also to Western, and to the peculiar tragedy of cultural immiscibility - forgetting the obvious East/West front, Shafak protrays so many levels of difference: Kurdish/Turkish, male/female, urban/rural, rich/poor, white/non-white, married/unmarried, sonless/with sons, virgin/tainted, captive/captor, victim/aggressor - you can't point at any person and isolate them from everyone else, into a single 'differentness': their differences and sameness are liquid and overlapping, sometimes changing in a minute. There is something so...rich, textured and multilayered about Shafak's narrative.
Read more ›
2 Comments 39 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
Format: Paperback Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
This is an agonising tale of families, love and tragic misunderstandings. But it is so acutely observed and sensitively handled that it is hard to put down. It is as much about the British immigrant experience as it is about Turkish & Kurdish culture - the clashes are inevitable.

Initially at least, it is little confusing to follow as we flit from generation to generation of one extended family. One minute we're in a very rural community on the banks of the Euphrates, the next minute we're in East London 25 years later, then we're whisked to a prison outside Shrewsbury in the early 90s. This gives it a kaleidoscopic feel - it is disorientating. But then perhaps that is the point. For just like the immigrants of the story, it's hard to know where you are at times.

The obvious theme of the book's title is a difficult one, and hard for westerners to fully appreciate. It takes an insider like Elif Shafak, who has known both worlds first hand, to be able to articulate it well. What comes across so clearly are the double standards of what is acceptable, or 'honourable' for men and women. Things are so clearly unfair - and the consequences are truly terrible. But as one hears more about so called 'honour killings' in the media, it is vital to understand the mentality behind them (if there is a logic to them at all) - and this book will go a long way to helping with that. We in the West are so atomised that our families now barely even count as nuclear - the idea of loyalties and responsibilities to wider family members seems increasingly alien. But what this book tentatively seems to suggest is that neither west nor middle east has it quite right. Extended family relationships can also be distorted and dysfunctional. Both worlds leave one crying for something better...

This is beautifully written and poignant book. And one that can only improve mutual cultural understanding.
1 Comment 25 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
Format: Paperback
I've just finished reading this great book. It was on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and quite frankly, if this didn't make the shortlist then the shortlisted books must be amazing this year. Elif Shafak is an author I hadn't come across. Born in France she is the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Writing in both Turkish and English, her previous novel The Forty Rules of Love sold over 600,000 copies and she is the recipient of prestigious honours and awards.
Honour is a book with so much depth as we follow one families journey covering their origins in a village near the river Euphrates in Turkey and their move to Hackney, London. But this is not just another story about an immigrant family settling in London. This is a story that draws strongly on its Eastern sense of tradition and the secrets that are kept over generations, repeating themselves destructively. It is a tragedy in almost Shakespearian proportions and one with such a superb twist in the tale that leaves you almost gasping with its cleverness. It is really a treasure in story-telling.
At it's centre is an honour killing but this almost becomes a side issue in the branching stories that we follow concerning each member and the role they play. The core of the plot centres around Pembe, a Turkish wife, mother, sister and daughter. Her connections from each of these roles each play their part in the tale- her useless husband who repeats the mistakes of his father, her children who each play a vital role in the story, her twin sister whose actions affect her whole future and her father, traditional and honour bound himself. The book is an insight into the traditional Turkish culture and also a picture of the difficulties of adapting to new cultures.
Honour is a great introduction to the writing of Elif Shafak that will leave you reeling from its final tie ups in the story and wanting to read more of this talented authors work.
Comment 8 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse

Most Recent Customer Reviews


Look for similar items by category


Feedback