She now lives in the Boston area with her family.Īmazon's Best Editor's Pick Best Literature & FictionĮditor's Top Pick from Real Simple magazine Newsweek's 30 Best Summer Books Born in Turkey to Iranian parents, Kamali spent her childhood in Turkey, Iran, Germany, Kenya, and the U.S. Kamali holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Columbia University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University. Her essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kamali’s novels are published in translation in more than 25 languages. She is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Marjan Kamali is the author of The Stationery Shop (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), a national bestseller, and Together Tea (EccoBooks/HarperCollins), a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. With a sorrowful heart, she moves on-to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England-until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me? For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran.Ī few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts-a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer-handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry-and she loses her heart at once.

Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, stocked with books and pens and bottles of jewel-colored ink.

Roya, a dreamy, idealistic teenager living amid the political upheaval of 1953 Tehran, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. A poignant, heartfelt new novel by the award-nominated author of Together Tea-extolled by the Wall Street Journal as a “moving tale of lost love” and by Shelf Awareness as “a powerful, heartbreaking story”-explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate.

The stationery shop review