The Stationery Shop of Tehran

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In chapter 18, Bahman reveals the struggles of living with a mentally ill mother in Tehran. Discuss mental illness and its stigma as a group. How was mental illness viewed throughout time, and how does the treatment of the mentally ill vary across cultures? How is the way that Bahman and his father care for his mother countercultural? Some things stay with you, haunt you. Some embers nestle into your skin. Shots cannot be forgotten. And neither can that force of love.” I’m honored to have Mozhan Marnò and the team at HBO and A Penny for Your Thoughts Entertainment work on this TV adaptation. I will serve as consulting producer on the series. This story was started in Tehran, a stationary shop, it's a place where its owner Mr. Fakhri, helps the young people for their political awakening and fight for reformist changing of their country but it is also the safe place of book lovers who want to devour the words and broaden their intellectual minds.

Besides being a very engaging enjoyable book.....this story is timely - given the political relations between the United States and Iran today. This is historical fiction done right! The Stationery Shop is the beautifully told story of Roya Kayhani, a 17-year old lover of Persian poetry and Bahman Aslan, an energetic young man already known as a political activist. The two meet in Mr. Fakhri’s stationery shop and begin to fall in love. Despite the objections of Bahman’s class-conscious mother, they become engaged. Their passionate romance is set against the political passions of 1953 Iran. Roya and Bahman decide to marry and arrange to meet, but a coup d’état against Mossadegh causes chaos in Tehran and Bahman does not show. Heartbroken, Roya decides to go to college in America where she meets and marries a young Boston law student and settles down. Sixty years later, she discovers that Bahman is a resident in a nursing home nearby. Roya decides to visit him and finally piece together the truth about their ill-fated story. I was stunned, and kept thinking of what it must feel like to an elderly person in an assisted living center with a past no one believed – or worse, a past they believed but just didn’t care about. The image of an elderly man in a wheelchair in an assisted living center became the kernel for the start of “The Stationery Shop.” The Stationary Shop was a beautiful and emotional story. Great for book clubs, lovers of historical fiction, and love stories. the love will continue to live the young will continue their hope the fight for democracy won’t die his books the words the notes the letters the hope cannot ever end. It is a love from which we never recover.”Usually, the news in the U.S. focuses on Iranian ideologues, post-1979. What’s often missing is the larger context of the history of the country.

This readers group guide for The Stationery Shop includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.In the 1950s, women in Tehran weren’t allowed the freedoms, though still limited, that women in America were. How does Roya’s family challenge those social expectations? How does that inform Roya’s life as grown woman?

Is it true that your book was inspired by an elderly man you met in an assisted living center who had met Spanish royalty and traveled with Charles de Gaulle? Sad but lovely. This is the kind of book you will enjoy reading indoors with a glass of wine or a mug of tea. Because tissues are involved. Mr. Fakhri used to refer to Bahman as “the boy who would change the world”. Symbolically....the title of this book will be clear in many more ways than one, once the reader is finished reading it all. The first part reminded me of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which it portrays the relationship of two sisters and parents who are worried about their future.The characters in The Stationery Shop experience several devastating losses, from love to identity to miscarriage. How do they recover, and how do those losses forever change them? Can your group relate to these sorrows? What losses in your lives have forever changed you? Fresh air! So you can howl at the moon like a wolf for getting rid of bottled up emotions, anger, frustration. The second part reminded me a bit of Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook but it turned out to be more than that. Young-adult-coming of age - falling in love and all the influential complexities including parents - in-laws - siblings - friends - aging (memories, ailments, regrets, sorrows, perspective)

Before meeting as a group, each member should research the events of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. Discuss your perceptions of Iran’s relationship with the US before and after learning about the coup. Did this research change what you think about the history of US foreign policy? Why or why not? Rolls of toilet papers, napkins, paper towels, anything helping you out to clean the nasty evidence of your ugly cries! Please come,” Claire said softly. “I’ll take you right to him.” This time she didn’t add the obligatory exclamation mark that seemed necessary for covering up misery around here.A couple months later, Roya and Bahman are to be married, and just before they are supposed to meet, the coup d’etat occurs that changes Iran forever. And Bahman never shows up. I love the book more because it talked more about the love of books and poetry especially Rumi; food and cooking; old age health issues as well as for showing a complete sense of difference between young everlasting love and the love we end up having. Roya’s mother had always said that our fate is written on our foreheads when we’re born. It can’t be seen, can’t be read, but it’s there in invisible ink all right, and life follows that fate. No matter what.” However, I find this book so damn satisfying to read. It feels complete and soothing for something this sad and heartbreaking. There has been so many deaths of which I find the dead of kids to be most disturbing and sad. 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.