The Stationery Shop of Tehran

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Bahman wondered what his generation learned. He had worked hard to do all the right things to bring about political change… Democracy…

She had loved him and her love for him had never quite stopped. She had tried to push it down, hide it, make it disappear. But it was always there. It floated in the branches of the trees outside her California college boarding-house, it was in the layers of the clouds in New England, it had been in the red puffed-up chest of a bird that sang in winter. It was everywhere. Still.” This was a historical fiction novel that took place during the 1953 political uprising in Tehran, Iran. Roya and Bahman meet in Mr. Fakhri's stationery shop, a favorite place for them both. After falling in love against all odds, they plan to meet in secret and marry, but when that day comes, Roya finds that Bahman doesn't show. There is commotion in the square, and great tragedy strikes. Sixty years after her first love failed to meet her in a market square, Roya Khanom Archer finally has the chance to see him. But will he break her heart again? I currently teach a class on the novel at GrubStreet, where I have fourteen students who work with me for nine months to shepherd the first drafts of their novels into being. I love teaching and find it to be rewarding and so fulfilling. There is nothing better than passing on hard-earned wisdom and knowledge to a group of enthusiastic and dedicated students. I love helping my students work on their craft to create fiction that reflects the truest things they want to say.The story of teenagers in Iran whose love is disrupted by the events of 1953 and the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, “The Stationery Shop” will involve actress and writer Mozhan Marnò, who was in “House of Cards.” This story romanced me with how beautifully it was written. I learned so much about the politics, customs, clothing, food. It was a delight for the senses, and I felt as if I was almost reading one of Jhumpa Lahiri's novels, the way the author used sensory imagery. The first two chapters show us very different stages in Roya’s life. Discuss the similarities and differences between her life as a married woman in New England and her life as a teenager living in Tehran.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. Maybe I shouldn't have read this alongside a book by Elif Shafak...a writer who brilliantly evoke multiple cultures and cities populating them with vastly differentiating, and realistic, people. Although in The Stationery Shop there are glimpses of a talented writer, the writing was incredibly repetitive with an abundance of clichéd phrases and observations. The few scenes which managed not to make me roll my eyes were the ones which revolved around cooking.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. They had owned a future and a fate, engaged in a country on the verge of a bold beginning. She had loved him with the force of a blast. It had been impossible to imagine a future in which she didn’t hear his voice every day.” I felt incredibly sad for people who worked hard for good changes in the world, but then saw themselves as failures, or worse....dead. The anti-Mossadegh folks were angry - they thought Mossadegh was a communist and many not only wanted to replace him - plotting against him for General Zahedi as post-coo Prime Minister replacement - they wanted Mossadegh dead. This is a beautifully written love story set against the political upheaval of Iran in August 1953, which saw the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh ousted by a coup designed to keep Iran in the hands of the Shah and its oil under control of the British and Americans.

Walter sighed. He held up five fingers to indicate to Claire that his wife believed in the five stars. Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable characters and just the right amount of sexual tension.

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Roya followed Claire down a corridor and into a large hall furnished with a long table and plastic folding chairs arranged on either side. But no one sat at the table playing bingo or gossiping. The Iranian-American author Marjan Kamali, whose novel “The Stationery Shop” was published in 2019, is about to see it come to life as an HBO series.

I am good,” she said. She’d learned to say that from Americans: I’m good, I’m fine, it’s all okay, okey-dokey. Easy-peasy Americanisms. She knew how to do it. Her heart pounded, but she looked steadily at Claire. Bahman literally vanished from Roya’s life on the very same day that they had planned to meet at Sephah Square at Cafe Ghandi.....the same cafe where Roya first tasted coffee during the New Year holiday: ‘Nowruz’. It was 1953. It was summer. She was seventeen. New England melted away, and the cold outside and the false heat inside evaporated, and Roya’s legs were tanned and toned, and they were standing, she and he, by the barricades, leaning onto the splintered wood, screaming at the top of their lungs. The crowd billowed, the sun burned her scalp, two long braids ended at her breasts, her Peter Pan collar was soaked in sweat. All around them, people pumped their fists and cried as one. Anticipation, the knowing of something new and better about to arrive, the certainty that she would be his in a free, democratic Iran—it was all theirs. They had owned a future and a fate, engaged in a country on the verge of a bold beginning. She had loved him with the force of a blast. It had been impossible to imagine a future in which she didn’t hear his voice every day. Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.The story ends with an unpredicted twist that brings understanding to all the characters and their relationships. Kamali closes the loop at the very end, where the now old Roya and Brahman reunite, mend broken hearts and revisit all that went wrong in Iran when they were young and in love. The minute I heard my first love story,I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.They’re in each other all along.” Four and a half years after the coop...four and a half years since Roya and Bahman were to marry.... Omg this was such a heartfelt, wonderful, emotional, utterly heartbreaking read. It’s the perfect eye opening to the Iran culture and customs and it’s political conflicts and what happened to their country in the past. It’s story of loss and love and remembrance. The book taught me so many things and effected me so deeply 💕