Honor
A Powerful Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick About the Heartbreaking Challenges of Love
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
'A powerful, important, unforgettable book' Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
In this riveting and immersive novel, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar tells the story of two couples and the sometimes dangerous and heartbreaking challenges of love across a cultural divide.
Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena – a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man – Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one's own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita's own past. While Meena's fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves: Smita realizes she has the freedom to enter into a casual affair, knowing she can decide later how much it means to her.
In this tender and evocative novel about love, hope, familial devotion, betrayal and sacrifice, Thrity Umrigar shows us two courageous women trying to navigate how to be true to their homelands and themselves at the same time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Umrigar (Everybody's Son) returns to themes of India's evolution and the transformative potential of women's relationships in her uneven latest. Despite traveling the world as a foreign correspondent, Smita Agarwal has not returned to India, the land of her birth, since her family left for Ohio when she was a teenager. But when a colleague is badly injured while reporting on a murder trial that overlaps with Smita's gender issues beat, Smita takes over the assignment. A young Hindu mother, Meena Mustafa, has accused her two brothers of killing her Muslim husband in a fire that also left Meena badly scarred. Meena's story both reinforces and complicates Smita's preconceptions about India's gender dynamics, religious divisions, and caste hierarchies. Speaking with Meena also forces Smita to confront long-hidden facets of her own past. Both Meena's recollections and Smita's narrative contain moments of emotional clarity and terror. Their propulsive stories and well-developed characterizations, however, don't quite compensate for the flat, even cartoonish, supporting characters, or for a romantic subplot involving Smita and a man she meets while reporting on the story, which reads like an afterthought. Umrigar offers readers a broad understanding of the complicated issues at play in contemporary India, but the story fails to do the subject justice.
