Honour is a page-turning mystery novel, filled with passion and intrigue.

The book is a work of fiction, and yet it is rooted in fact. The plot was inspired by troubling events that Joan Sidnell observed from the rooftop patio of her Cairo apartment several decades ago. The truth behind these events was a mystery, but she gleaned a few clues from her expat circle. A friend’s gardener, who was plugged into the impoverished community across the railway tracks, had heard rumours. They centred around the issue of honour and the harsh justice meted out to transgressors by a deeply conservative society.

Joan was already aware of the difficult situation faced by women in Egypt. But these new events disturbed her. They also fired her literary imagination, and before long she was writing an imagined account of how such horrors had come to pass.

This narrative was interwoven with another thread, that of an English expat seeking to understand the brutal world beyond her middle-class bubble – and if possible, to help the hand of justice.

This book can be read as a detective story enriched by an evocative cultural setting. But it also serves to highlight the disadvantaged position of many woman and girls within a traditional, religious society. Finally, it provides a window onto the stresses and strains of inter-cultural marriage, and the sense of dislocation that many foreign residents feel in their home from home.

This is a book based on reality and written from the heart, and its central themes are still as relevant today as when the tale was first written.

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