Book
The Forty Rules of Love
by Elif Shafak
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In contemporary Massachusetts, Ella Rubinstein accepts work reading a manuscript about the thirteenth-century poet and scholar Jalal al-Din Rumi. The manuscript follows the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz to Konya, where his uncompromising spiritual teaching transforms Rumi’s household, reputation and understanding of divine love.
Ella’s correspondence with the manuscript’s author begins to challenge her own dutiful but emotionally empty marriage. The two narratives mirror one another as love becomes a force capable of unsettling family, religious authority and social convention. In the historical strand, Shams’s influence provokes jealousy and violence; in the modern strand, Ella must decide whether insight without action can change a life.
Historical periods
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