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  • Published: 15 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241996546
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $28.00

The Forty Rules of Love




A magical, cross-century tale of self-discovery from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - now a Penguin Essential

Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled by love.

So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and his mentor Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, she is ready to look at her life anew. Compelled to embrace change, she embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author. It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into a faraway world where faith and doubt are heartbreakingly explored. The Forty Rules of Love is a mesmerising tale of discovery, language, truth and, of course, love itself.

  • Published: 15 August 2023
  • ISBN: 9780241996546
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-eight languages. The author of twenty books, thirteen of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel. Shafak holds a PhD in political science, and is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in 2024, was awarded the British Academy President's Medal for ‘her excellent body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range’.

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Praise for The Forty Rules of Love

A gorgeous, jeweled, luxurious book

The Times

With its timely, thought-provoking message . . . The Forty Rules of Love deserves to be a global publishing phenomenon

Independent

Enlightening, enthralling. An affecting paean to faith and love

Metro

Colourfully woven and beguilingly intelligent

Daily Telegraph

The past and present fit together beautifully in a passionate defence of passion itself

The Times