Buckinghamshire Advertiser (UK) - June 17, 2010
“… Elif Shafak's latest novel is a marvellous tome on love and spirituality… middle-Eastern journeys of discovery and fear, of resentment, poetry and love. A philosophical rule book, offering imaginatively diverse twists and possibilities, a modern fable and a darn good read.”

National Public Radio - March 17, 2010
Read and hear the review by Alan Cheuse here on NPR's All Things Considered...

More Magazine- March 1, 2010
In this appealing fable, Turkish author Elif Shafak toggles between characters from different times: a modern American housewife and a thirteenth-century poet.
Ella Rubinstein is unhappily married when she takes a job at a literary agency. There she finds a manuscript about the poet Rumi by a writer named Aziz Zahara. Zahara’s meditations on love enchant Ella, and the two begin a flirtatious correspondence: “Love came to Ella as suddenly and brusquely as if a stone had been hurled from out of nowhere into the tranquil pond of her life.”
The universal theme is the struggle between the rational mind and the aching heart. Shafak’s heroine yields to the latter and never looks back.
-- Carmela Ciuraru

San Francisco Examiner – February 23, 2010
"…A wandering dervish called Shams of Tabriz came as the answer to Rumi's prayers. The pair were kindred spirits and intellectual equals who reveled in discussing and debating matters of God, man and divine love. Their friendship, in 13th-century Anatolia, transformed Rumi.
The tale of their fated meeting, spiritual companionship and tragic parting is beautifully recounted in the new novel "The Forty Rules of Love," by Turkish writer Elif Shafak… a captivating and wise book."

Booklist Starred Review - February 15, 2010
As in her previous book, The Bastard of Istanbul (2007), Shafak, a courageous, best-selling Turkish writer, boldly links East and West in converging narratives. In present-day Massachusetts, Ella, an unhappy housewife on the cusp of 40, begins reading manuscripts for a literary agency, and soon finds herself exchanging personal e-mails with Aziz Zahara, a wandering Sufi photographer and the author of Ella’s first assignment, an enthralling novel titled Sweet Blasphemy. It fictionalizes the true story of the esteemed thirteenth-century Muslim teacher Rumi, who undergoes a profound transformation when the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, a renegade of strange and unnerving powers, comes to town. The two become inseparable, and as Shams shares the liberating “forty rules of love,” Rumi becomes a rebel mystic, the inventor of the “ecstatic dance” of the whirling dervishes, and a fervent and cherished poet. Under Aziz’s influence, Ella also breaks free of convention and opens herself to cosmic forces. Infused with Sufi mysticism and Rumi’s incomparable lyrics, and sweetly human in its embrace of our flaws and failings, Shafak’s seductive, shrewd, and affecting novel brilliantly revives the revelations of Shams and Rumi, and daringly illuminates the differences between religion and spirituality, censure and compassion, fear and love of life in our own violent world.
-- Donna Seaman

Library Journal - January 15, 2010
"Moving rapidly across continents and across time, Shafak's allegorical tale functions as a vehicle for the titular 40 rules, which are woven throughout. Chapters alternate between Ella's life in 2008 and the lives of Rumi and other characters from the manuscript, set around 1245. The tantalizing possibility of romance lingers... these Forty Rules of Love point not to eros but to agape, the love of God and of all beings."