issa

Pinhan (1997) • Şehrin Aynaları (1999) • Mahrem (The Gaze, 2000) • Bit Palas (The Flea Palace, 2002) • The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004) • Baba ve Piç (The Bastard of Istanbul, 2006) • Black Milk: On Motherhood, Writing and the Harem Within (2007) • The Forty Rules of Love (2009) • İskender (Honour, 2011) • Ustam ve Ben (The Architect’s Apprentice, 2013) • Havva’nın Üç Kızı (Three Daughters of Eve, 2016) •  THE LAST TABOO (2018) • 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019) • How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division (2020) • The Island of Missing Trees (2021) • There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) •

Title: The Forty Rules of Love
Author: Elif Shafak
First Published: 2009, Viking
Present Library Copy: Penguin Books, 2011
Language: English
Genre: Literary Spiritual Fiction
Place of Writing: Istanbul, Turkey and London, UK (2007 - 2008)
Pages: 368
ISBN: 978-1-84659-037-5
Notes | The Forty Rules of Love is a cornerstone of Elif Shafak’s literary career and exemplifies her unique fusion of spiritual inquiry, historical fiction, and contemporary storytelling. It reflects many of the thematic preoccupations that recur across her work—deeply lyrical, structurally layered, and spiritually expansive. It embodies her interest in storytelling as a healing force and literature as a meeting ground for diverse traditions and beliefs.


Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara.

Ella is mesmerized by Zahara's tale of Shams of Tabriz's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir­rors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.

The Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, Shams, the whirling dervish—that together explore the enduring power of Rumi's work.


“A Novel of Rumi—Gorgeous, jewelled, luxurious book ” 
The Times, London




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