The Forty Rules of Love
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Average rating3.6
*The international bestseller* "Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough..." 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 Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work. It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into an exotic world where faith and love are heartbreakingly explored. . . '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
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I enjoyed the sections about Shams, but I was far less taken with the modern tale of Ella.
Ella, in mid-life, gets a job as a reader for a literary agency. (Really? Seems pretty unlikely.) And then she doesn't really do her job, but instead strikes up a correspondence with the author of the novel she's supposed to be reading. Meanwhile, she suspects that her husband is sleeping with other women . . .
I enjoyed the intricacies of the plot, weaving a mid-13th Century story about Rumi with Ella's. But Ella's own story stretched credulity for me, and the many points of view of the interior story (the Rumi novel that she has been assigned to read) were off-putting.
