With more than 150,000 copies sold, Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love is already a no. 1 bestseller in Turkey. One of the best known authors of Turkish descent writing today, Shafak was charged with the crime of "insulting Turkishness" by the Turkish government for her previous novel The Bastard of Istanbul; the critically acclaimed author was ultimately pardoned. In The Forty Rules of Love, Shafak tells the story of a romance between a modern Jewish-American housewife and a male Sufi living in Amsterdam interwoven with a parallel narrative about the intense spiritual bond between the historical figures of Rumi and the Shams of Tabris.