The last thing I had expected was to be so emotionally "touched" as I was reading Marjan Kamali's "The stationary shop of Tehran". I am known to enjoy reading love stories but there was something quite different about this enduring and thwarted love and loss novel though, which inevitably shook me.
Being quite familiar with the history of Iran, Rumi's poetry, Iranians' attitude towards life, as well as Iranian cuisine, all of which play an important role throughout the whole story, made it all too intimate for me to be able to distance myself and as the story progressed I felt such a strong bond with some of the many interesting characters that populated it that when fate struck I couldn't help feeling the pain of those directly and indirectly affected by it. Marjan Kamali structured the novel in such a way that as a reader I craved to turn the page and see what was going to happen next.
"Set in a country poised for democracy but destroyed by political upheaval, Marjan Kamali's beautiful novel explores issues that have never been more timely, of immigration and cultural assimilation, of the quirks of fate." - Booktopia
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