The Stationery Shop of Tehran Review

The Stationery Shop of Tehran is a love story. But it is also a story about the 1953 coup in Iran when the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown with the help of British and American intelligence. Kamali weaves those two things together in a way that felt completely natural rather than like the historical backdrop was being bolted on for importance. The political chaos does more than surround the love story. It breaks it apart. And that is what the whole novel is really about.

Roya is seventeen years old and in love with a boy named Bahman who she meets at the stationery shop of the title. They spend their time in this small book and paper filled shop reading poetry and falling for each other. Then the coup happens and everything goes wrong in a way that takes sixty years to fully understand. The novel moves between 1953 Tehran and modern day Massachusetts and Kamali handles both timelines with total confidence. I cared about Roya at every age she appears in the book and that is not an easy thing to pull off.

There is a letter at the centre of this book that changes everything. When you find out what really happened to it i promise you will need to put the book down for a minute. My reaction reading this for the first time on a Saturday afternoon was deeply personal. This is a book about what history does to ordinary people. Not the people who make decisions in rooms. The people who are just trying to be young and fall in love and get on with things when the world will not let them. What nobody can reasonably complain about is the writing. Kamali writes clear, warm prose that moves quickly once the story gets going. There is no showing off. No long passages that feel like they are waiting for you to admire them. Just a story told very well by someone who clearly cared deeply about getting it right.