Book reviews: Murder in the Name of Honour | Maidens' Trip | Ground Control

Published on Friday 3 July 2009 22:20

MURDER IN THE NAME OF HONOUR BY RANA HUSSEINI (Oneworld, £12.99)

AT LEAST a dozen girls and women in the UK – as many as 5,000 worldwide – are done to death each year in so-called "honour killings". The shame brought on their families by their (real or imaginary) sexual transgressions can be wiped clean only by their deaths, their near and dear insist. For a decade, Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini has pursued a heroically persistent investigation of this cruellest of crimes, and kept up an outspoken campaign against it. As shocking as the savagery of the murders is the collusion of the authorities, she suggests. In South Asia and the Middle East, there's often a tacit tolerance of such crimes, while western governments won't act for fear of offending the sensibilities of immigrant groups.

MAIDENS' TRIP BY EMMA SMITH (Bloomsbury, 14.99)

"Had it not been for the war we should never have known what it was to travel on a canal. Yet war was little more than a distant noise in our ears." The Second World War encompassed a world of different experiences, ranging from the terrifying to the quirky. It's into this last category that Emma Smith's service falls. Along with two other delicately nurtured young ladies, she signed up to pilot a barge moving supplies up and down the Grand Union Canal between Birmingham and London. The life they lived, the duties they had to perform, the people they met and the challenges they faced could hardly have been further removed from anything their upbringing had prepared them for. But good humour and resourcefulness saw them through. First published in 1948, Smith's lightly fictionalised account of their adventures makes for an engaging – and surprisingly exciting – read.

GROUND CONTROL BY ANNA MINTON (Penguin, 9.99)

THE ultimate urban legend is that of the city as a sink of squalor and crime, modern civilisation's heart of darkness. Despite the media mythology of knife-crime, guns and gangs in no-go areas, crime-rates fall in communities where ordinary families work hard to get by. The result, says Minton, is a nation living in largely groundless fear and mutual suspicion; feelings exploited by those private enterprises that are progressively annexing what used to be public space. And they do so with the full co-operation, even the encouragement of local councils, thanks to the prevailing post-Thatcher business-knows-best ideology.