When she falls in love with Michael, a young Catholic major in the British Army, she is forced to keep the relationship a secret and rely on her friend Norma to act as an intermediary.
Although the lovers are only able to be alone together on a handful of occasions and Dalia's virginity remains intact, her father is so enraged when he hears of the affair from her older brother that he kills her two months after her twenty-sixth birthday.
[2] Further, Khouri had promised to donate most of the proceeds to the Jordanian National Association for Women, but had only sent $100,[3] while the group was suspicious of her claims from the start, contending that it would have known about such a crime given Jordan's size.
[2] In July 2004, a year after the book's release, Sydney Morning Herald literary editor Malcolm Knox wrote a series of articles that exposed Khouri as a complete fraud.
Khouri continued to insist she'd told the truth, even when confronted with public records which proved beyond all doubt she had spent most of her life in the United States.