The Forty Rules of Love

by Elif Shafak

made Ella feel that she was somehow breaking away from her staid and tranquil life. From a woman with lots of dull grays and browns on her life’s canvas, she was turning into a woman with a secret color—a bright, tantalizing red. And she loved it. Aziz was no man for small pleasantries. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were not really alive. (Ella wondered if this might put her on his list of inanimate objects.) Aziz didn’t write about the weather or the latest movie he had seen. He wrote about other things, deeper things, like life and death, and above all love. Ella was not used to expressing her feelings on such issues, especially to a stranger, but perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind.