The Stationery Shop

The novel opens in 2013 in a Massachusetts winter. Roya Archer arrives with her husband Walter at the Duxton Senior Center care home and tells the front desk that she has made an appointment to see «Mr. Bahman Aslan». Walter is kind, logical, a man who eats a boiled egg every morning. Roya believes that something that began a week earlier in a shop she entered only to buy paper clips has taken her back to 1953. The old man in the wheelchair says «I waited». Roya asks the question she has wanted to ask for sixty years.

From chapter two the Tehran of 1953 begins. Seventeen-year-old Roya and her sister Zari, eighteen months younger, are at school; their father is devoted to education and democracy and wants his daughters to be «the next Marie Curie and Helen Keller». Prime Minister Mossadegh divides the country by nationalizing oil, the girls at school split into communists, royalists and Mossadegh supporters, and the police soak a girl handing out political leaflets with a water hose at the school gate. Roya would rather read Hemingway, Dostoevsky and Rumi.

Roya's favourite place in Tehran is the stationery shop on the corner of Churchill Avenue and Hafez Boulevard. Opposite the Russian embassy, the shop sells as many notebooks and pens as books. Its owner, Mr. Fakhri, stocks Rumi, Saadi and translated novels. One day a boy comes into the shop like the wind, and Mr. Fakhri has a roll of paper ready for him: Bahman Aslan, «the boy who wants to change the world». They meet at the shop every Tuesday, and on the seventh Tuesday Bahman holds her hand for the first time. Then Roya learns that Mr. Fakhri keeps far more dangerous political material in the back storeroom.

Bahman takes Roya to a pro-Mossadegh rally and shields her against a barricade among cries of «Mossadegh or death». Suddenly three men come from behind; one hits Bahman on the neck with a chain-tipped club and says «you had better not spread so much nonsense». Bahman's friend Jahangir takes the bleeding Bahman to his father's clinic. After Nowruz, Bahman gives Roya a notebook for her poems and writes a line of Rumi on the first page: «Lovers do not finally meet somewhere; they are in each other from the beginning». At Café Ghanadi she tastes shir-qahveh for the first time and they share an «elephant ear» and a «tongue» pastry.

In chapter six they watch De Sica's «Bicycle Thieves» at the Metropol Cinema, and Bahman talks to Roya about poverty and democracy. Next to a jasmine bush they share their first kiss, and Bahman proposes. Roya tells her sister it is «as if a tree fell on my head». Zari is sceptical: political boys cannot be trusted, and they do not know Bahman's family. Bahman comes alone to ask the family's permission, saying his mother is ill. The part read breaks off at the moment he is about to say what he will tell them about his family.

The design of the novel is very simple, which is its strength: on one side old age, loss and a question that comes late; on the other a first love born in political turmoil. The 2013 chapters are short, and each takes Roya's memory back to 1953. The chapter headings give the year and a short name together, which helps the reader not to lose the time layer. In the part read, Mossadegh's overthrow appears only as rumours and warnings: «we cannot let them overthrow him».

• Two time layers: New England in 2013 and Tehran in 1953
• Historical backdrop (Mossadegh, the nationalization of oil, political divisions at school) woven into the love story
• Poems of Rumi and Saadi, and the year and a short name at the head of each chapter
• Everyday detail: the Nowruz table, Café Ghanadi, the Metropol Cinema, the smell of notebooks and pencils
• A girl caught between an educated, liberal family and conservative relatives