Honour

Honour follows a Turkish-Kurdish family whose lives stretch from a village near the Euphrates to the immigrant streets of 1970s London. At its center are twin sisters — Pembe, who marries and moves to England, and Jamila, who stays behind — and Pembe's children, especially her son Iskender, who grows up caught between the expectations of his heritage and the freedoms of his new country.

When Pembe forms a tender friendship with another man, the family's fragile equilibrium begins to crack along the fault line of "honour," a code that promises belonging and demands terrible things in its name. Told across decades and multiple points of view, the novel traces how love, shame, and loyalty pass from one generation to the next.

Elif Shafak's novel is a compassionate, unflinching family saga about migration, gender, and the devastating logic of honour — a story that asks what we owe our families and what they have no right to ask of us.