The Stationery Shop

In the summer of 1953, seventeen-year-old Roya spends her afternoons in Mr. Fakhri's neighborhood stationery shop in Tehran, a haven of poetry, jewel-colored inks, and fine paper amid a city on the brink of political upheaval. There she meets Bahman, a passionate, idealistic young man who shares her love of Rumi, and the two fall deeply in love. On the eve of their marriage, they arrange to meet in the town square — but the day erupts in the violence of the 1953 coup, and Bahman never comes. Roya loses him, and the life she imagined, in a single afternoon.

More than sixty years later, Roya is an old woman living quietly in New England, her long marriage and American life far from the Tehran of her youth. Then a chance encounter brings her face to face with Bahman once more, and the questions she has carried for a lifetime — why he vanished, whether he ever truly loved her — finally begin to find their answers.

Marjan Kamali's The Stationery Shop is a sweeping, tender novel of first love, fate, and the long shadow of a single day. Moving between 1953 Tehran and the present, it weaves personal heartbreak together with a pivotal moment in Iranian history, and asks how much of a life is shaped by love, and how much by forces beyond our control.