The Stationery Shop of Tehran

Product Information

Years pass- sixty years, in fact, until Roya and Bahman are reunited. Roya understandably has many questions for him about where he’s been.

Passing on Roya’s normal drink - tea - to try coffee - wasn’t the only change for Roya during the most memorable summer of her life. Everything was changing fast and faster since falling in love with Bahman. Her thinking opened politically in ways they never had until she fell in love with an activist.The Stationery Shop is a beautiful and timely exploration of devastating loss, unbreakable family bonds, and the overwhelming power of love. The characters in The Stationery Shop experience several devastating losses, from love to identity to miscarriage. How do they recover, and how do those losses forever change them? Can your group relate to these sorrows? What losses in your lives have forever changed you? Yes, yes I am because I’m a mood reader and have no shelf-control! *lol* Bad combination? Maybe, but I like to keep my books diverse and “The Stationary Shop of Tehran” is something totally different to what I usually read. It’s been a while I read a historical romance and I’m very curious about this one. Devastated Roya, decides to go to the US for college education and fresh start for her broken heart with her sister.

Roya stood uneasily in front of the desk. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of ammonia and some kind of stew. Beef? Definitely beef with onions. The heat, cranked up to compensate for the New England cold, made the stew smell overpowering. She couldn’t believe she had actually come here. The radiators hissed, wheelchairs squeaked, it all suddenly felt like a terrible mistake.The Stationery Shop” is about a young man and woman who are separated by the events of 1953. Why did you choose this particular episode in Iran’s history as the central event in your novel? This said, let’s get to the heart of it. One of the biggest issues I had with the book was the question on which kind of aspect it wanted to focus. At first there was a strong emphasis on politics and I would have been fine with this, but then the story changed course and became a tragic love story instead. There were a couple of time jumps that jarred with the narration and I didn’t always understand why the author chose to tell the story like this. I’m convinced that sometimes a different narration style would have been a better choice and would have made it easier to follow the overall tale and timeline. From the blurb the reader already knew that Roya and Bahman would have no future together but the way their lives drifted apart was truly heart-breaking. As I wrote, the story became one of a great lost love, and letters passed on in books in a stationery shop. The character of Roya took over much of the story. She meets Bahman in a stationery shop in 1953 Iran when they’re both 17. They fall briskly, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “into an intimacy from which they never recover.” They are madly in love and plan to get married, but are separated on the eve of the country’s coup d’état. Sixty years later, they reunite when Bahman is an elderly man in a wheelchair in an assisted living center. I dunno how I’m going to rate this. I think I’ll have to digest this first and think about it some more.