The Stationery Shop of Tehran

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death.

Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. How did you feel about the novel’s non-sequential chronology, which begins with the elderly Roya and Bahman’s reunion before taking readers back to their youthful love affair? Did this structure enhance your emotional connection to their story?

2. Kamali’s novel spans 60 years and shifts between Tehran and America. How did this sweeping timeline affect your emotional engagement with the characters? If you’ve read Marjan Kamali’s other novels, such as The Lion Women of Tehran, how does her approach to depicting Iranian immigrant experiences compare across works?

3. What aspects of the stationery shop itself—as both a physical place and a symbol—resonated most strongly with you? What emotions did Kamali evoke through this central setting?

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Roya finds herself caught between her father’s scientific ambitions for her and her own literary interests. Have you ever experienced tension between your passions and others’ expectations? How did you navigate this conflict?

2. The novel repeatedly returns to food and cooking as anchors for cultural identity and providers of emotional comfort. What foods or cooking traditions connect you to your heritage or bring you comfort during difficult times?

3. Roya learns to hold her love for Bahman and Walter in her heart simultaneously. Have you ever maintained deep connections to different people or places that seemed at odds with each other? How did you reconcile these seemingly conflicting attachments?

4. When Roya loses her daughter, Marigold, she eventually concludes that babies live on in memory. How do you relate to this perspective on grief and remembrance? What role does memory play in your processing of loss?

5. Throughout the novel, characters make life-altering decisions based on incomplete information, like the tampered letters between Roya and Bahman. Has missing information ever impacted a decision you made? How did you respond when you later discovered the full picture?

6. Both Roya and Zari immigrate to America, but they adapt differently to their new country. If you’ve experienced relocation or significant change, how did you balance preserving your previous identity with embracing new experiences?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. The novel depicts the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh as a pivotal moment in Iran’s history, orchestrated in part by foreign powers. How does this historical event inform your understanding of Iran-West relations?

2. The novel depicts different generations of Iranians—from Roya’s progressive father to the young revolutionaries of 1979—envisioning contrasting futures for their country. What does the novel suggest about how societies negotiate between tradition and progress?

3. Roya experiences both Iranian and American cultures during significant historical periods. How does the novel portray the strengths and limitations of both societies? What insights does this cross-cultural perspective offer about universal human values?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. How does Mrs. Aslan’s warning that “babies die” evolve in meaning throughout the narrative? How does this motif connect to the theme of memory and loss?

2. The stationery shop is both a literal setting and a metaphorical space in the novel. How does this symbol evolve throughout the narrative? What does Bahman’s recreation of it in America suggest about the preservation of culture and memory?

3. How does Kamali use the recurring motif of the Persian New Year (Nowruz) to structure the narrative and develop the theme of renewal amid loss? What other seasonal imagery contributes to this theme?

4. Compare and contrast Roya’s relationships with Bahman and Walter. How does Kamali portray different types of love through these relationships? This exploration of love lost and found over decades brings to mind Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. What similarities or differences do you see in how these novels approach love’s endurance over time?

5. The novel employs multiple narrative perspectives, including those of Mrs. Aslan and Mr. Fakhri. How do these shifting viewpoints contribute to your understanding of the central conflict? What insights do they provide that Roya’s perspective alone could not?

6. Examine the parallel romance between Ali (Mr. Fakhri) and Badri (Mrs. Aslan) alongside Roya and Bahman’s story. How does this earlier generation’s experience foreshadow and influence the main narrative?

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

1. What would you include in a letter from Roya to her granddaughter explaining Mr. Fakhri’s final thought: “It is a love from which we will never recover” (308)? How might she distill her lifetime of experience into wisdom about love and loss?

2. Design a contemporary stationery shop that would honor the spirit of Mr. Fakhri’s original store. What books, items, and atmosphere would capture its essence for today’s world?

3. Imagine you are to speak at Bahman’s memorial service. What would you highlight as his legacy and how he “change[d] the world” despite his doubts about fulfilling this destiny (37)?

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