She thinks about what went wrong, what could have been but also the big question – Was it their fate? The majority of this novel is merely Roya reminiscing, dwelling on her past that is too real and too intense to forget about, even as she ages into an old lady, which is where the story originally begins. It is inevitable that out of all the books I have read with woven storylines this is up there with the top as it all blends together perfectly at the end. The ways in which Marjan Kamali has perfectly woven multiple stories together in one is just admirable and unspokenly beautiful. Mr Fakhri plays a major role in this novel as we learn further into the book that he has his own secrets and it is through this that the tale of Roya and Bahman came to be. While this is an impressively imposing backdrop, the heart of the book, literally so, is the grand love affair between Roya and Bahman, who meet one day in the beautiful stationery store of Ali Fakhri, a learned man from a scholarly family who stocks his store with works of Iranian poetry, translated Western texts. But as you move deeper into this profoundly moving book, you begin to realise how much muscle Kamali has written into its entrancingly lovely but achingly sad narrative which moves along at a brisk pace without once sacrificing a sense of raw, potent emotional intimacy.
It’s against this backdrop that Roya, a young, studious girl and Bahman, an ardent young political activist fall in love. Iran is experiencing a brief spell of relative peace, although there are rumours of something terrible on the horizon whether it be an attack, a battle or an overthrowing. It is set in Tehran, 1953, before the coup.
“It is a love from which we never recover.” It has now been one week since I finished this novel, and the love I have for it is immense.
The beautiful cover is what caught my eye, and the fact that it was half price on amazon! However, as soon as I opened it and read the first page, I knew it was going to be a story that I would never forget. The Stationery Shop of Tehran is one of the more recent books that I have read and to be honest I wasn’t expecting much from it. This weeks review choice was quite difficult for me as I have so many I wanted to review, but after giving it much thought I have decided to review The Stationery Shop of Tehran. Hello everybody! I hope you all had a lovely week.
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