Ella Rubenstein’s life looks picture-perfect from the outside, with a steady marriage, a quiet home, and predictable days. Inside, she’s suffocating. When she accepts a job reading manuscripts, her first assignment changes everything. Sweet Blasphemy, written by the mysterious Aziz Zahara, tells the story of Shams of Tabriz and his transformative meeting with the poet Rumi.
As Ella becomes absorbed in the novel’s lessons on divine love, she begins to see her own life reflected in Rumi’s spiritual awakening. Shams’s forty rules challenge everything she believes about love, faith, and freedom.
Across centuries and continents, two stories intertwine: a woman searching for meaning and a mystic guiding a poet toward transcendence. In Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love, love itself becomes liberation.
