In 2019, Kamali issued her second novel, The Stationery Shop. It became a Massachusetts Book Award Finalist, an NPR WBUR Good Read, and a Target Emerging Author Selection. That debut, Together Tea, was published in 2013. at Columbia, she began to write at fiction, eventually penning a short story that would become the opening chapter of her debut novel. To distract herself from spreadsheet drudgery while studying for her M.B.A. Kamali holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and New York University. In 1982, the family moved to Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City. Her father was in the diplomatic corp, and Kamali spent her childhood in Kenya, Germany, Turkey, post-revolutionary Iran. Marjan Kamali was born in Turkey to Iranian parents.

Currently-lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Education-B.A., University of California-Berkeley M.B.A., Columbia University M.F.A., New York University.

Raised-Turkey, Kenya, Germany, Iran, and the U.S.

With a sorrowful heart, she moves on-to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England-until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me? ( From the publisher.)

In the chaos, Bahman never shows.įor weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran.Ī few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts-a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer-handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry-and she loses her heart at once. Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, stocked with books and pens and bottles of jewel-colored ink. Roya, a dreamy, idealistic teenager living amid the political upheaval of 1953 Tehran, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. A poignant, heartfelt novel of lost love explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate.

The stationery shop marjan kamali