Free Republic

NORMA Khouri was the toast of Australia's book-club circuit in 2003 – the brave woman whose Forbidden Love campaigned against Islamic honour killings in Jordan and became that year's "must read". But within a year the admiration withered. Khouri had been exposed as a fake. Her account of the death of her best friend Dalia at the hands of Dalia's father was a lie. There had been no Dalia, no Dalia's Christian lover, no avenging Islamic father. And Norma Khouri, the supposedly brave Jordanian writer, was in fact a Chicago conwoman on the run. Not only had Khouri deceived her...

August 1, 2004 -- When Atria Books withdrew the memoir "Honor Lost" from publication early this week, it spotlighted a problem that surfaces often in the book publishing business: the author's veracity had been called into question. Mainstream book publishers, most of which release several hundred books a year, do not routinely fact-check their material. They optimistically rely on authors, agents and their own antennae for falsehood. And sometimes, a promotable author and a gripping story can be more publishable than the truth. "Honor Lost," published in 2003, is Norma Khouri's supposedly real-life story about the author and her Muslim...

Her tragic story stole readers' hearts and triggered an international outcry. She became a best-selling author in the same league as J.K.Rowling and Michael Moore. She petitioned the United Nations personally, was published in 15 countries, and Australians voted her memoir into their favourite 100 books of all time. But Norma Khouri is a fake, and so is Forbidden Love. With Australian sales approaching 200,000, the book told of her lifelong friendship with a girl named Dalia in Amman, Jordan. In their 20s, Khouri wrote, she and Dalia started a hairdressing salon together. Dalia met and fell in love with...

Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, by Norma Khouri (Atria, $24.00) 211 pages In 1999, a woman fleeing a forced marriage was shot by a contract killer in a human-rights worker's office. "The practice," explained a BBC report, "has been going on for ages in many of the tribal and conservative parts of Pakistan." Last year, a woman living near the border of Afghanistan was ordered stoned to death because she had been raped. The New York Times noted that she hailed from "the barren northwest," a victim of "Pakistan's strict Islamic laws." Such crimes are treated as...