Honor is a powerful novel by internationally bestselling Turkish author, Elif Shafak. Set against the backdrop of 1970s London, this dramatic tale delves into the lives of Turkish immigrants as they navigate love, family, and cultural misunderstandings.
The story follows twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. Jamila remains in the village, embracing her role as a midwife, while Pembe ventures to London with her Turkish husband, Adem, in search of a new life. In London, they face a pivotal choice: remain loyal to their old traditions or attempt to assimilate into a new culture.
When Adem abandons the family, their eldest son, Iskender, steps up to protect the family's honor. As Pembe embarks on a chaste affair with Elias, Iskender learns the heart-wrenching truth that love can coexist with the potential for deep hurt.
Honor is a gripping exploration of guilt and innocence, loyalty and betrayal, and the trials faced by immigrants. It is a poignant reflection on the love and heartbreak that often fracture families.
Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.
Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers brutally beat his father. Selling off his parents' jewelry, he paid for passage to the United States. Now, he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration and bitter nostalgia for their home continent.
He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago. Soon, Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors—Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter—who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years.
But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again. Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration, the novel casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country—and what it takes to create a new home.