A horrific story of appalling murder and awesome courage.

I felt moved by this book as the experiences resonate with many of the victims that we deal with every day. It also highlights how honour systems within family and community dynamics can paralyse someone into a place of great fear. It takes a great amount of courage to speak out. Sarbjit has been significant to enabling others to peer into the life of a family that put honour before a life. My hope is that this story will encourage many not to be silent but to come forward and speak out. As a campaigner in this field I give credit to this story that seeks to break the silences of many.

As this book and Surjit’s murder illustrates, the burden of carrying the honour of the family falls only on the shoulders of the women. The courage it takes to make your own choices can never be exaggerated. Time is no barrier to justice being delivered, the pain does not lessen with the years. It takes one brave soul to say “this is wrong” and then many lives to put it right. How many other unmarked graves are there of women who said no?

First-rate

[A] lively, yet scholarly, book... Kadri is an ideally positioned guide

Intellectually nimble and rigorously researched . . . admirably clear-eyed . . . Kadri is a precise and stylish writer, as good at explicating abstruse arguments as he is at conjuring vivid scenes . . . this brave and sane book could not be more timely

Truly penetrating and provocative

Learned, level-headed, engaging, Kadri's [book] deserves praise on every front

Thoughtful

[An] erudite and instructive book... Captivating

[A] fascinating journey . . . Kadri approaches his themes with unstinting humanity and intelligence, as well as great fluency

You will come across...a fresh eye, and a clear perspective, in Sadakat Kadri's new book, Heaven on Earth. Learned, level-headed, engaging, Kadri's "journey through Shari'a law" deserves praise on every front

This is an extremely valuable book...Knowing this stuff is important, and Kadri takes us through it wonderfully well. He has a great grasp of the facts and – this is my favourite thing – a good, dry sense of humour

Superb… So much discussion of sharia is marred by misinformation and paranoia: this level-headed book provides a timely corrective

The most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.

A magnificent new memoir.

This moving, sometimes irritating, often beautiful and blissfully funny memoir is also a resounding manifesto, reminding us that novelists have a right and duty to tackle the most controversial subjects.

His big, bold, controversial memoir…matches Rushdie’s confident personality.

[A book that] rattles with the terror of the moment.

The big book of the week was Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton

It’s an extraordinary document.

Rushdie says art outlasts persecution, but artists may not. A look at how this dichotomy has played out in his life.

Joseph Anton is as riveting for the small vignettes as the big, historical sweep.

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.

He is compelling here...grippingly reconstructing his long years in hiding.

[N]ot many Americans had heard of Rushdie until Valentines Day, 1989, when the dying Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued the infamous fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head... Rushdie spent most of the next decade in hiding, accompanied by armed British agents. He’s now published his account of that stranger-than-fiction time: Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Aside from the vivid, splendidly told account of his childhood and family background, Rushdie's book charts in, fascinating, grimly humourous detail, the shadowy half-life he lived until that fatwah was lifted on March 27, 2002.