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    A Stranger's Love
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    A Stranger's Love
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    A Stranger's Love
    Ebook194 pages2 hours

    A Stranger's Love

    By Laura Martin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "You may be sweet, but you're not innocent!"

    Bethany told herself she didn't care what Chad Alington thought of her. He was a perfect strangertoo perfect, in facta tall, dark, handsome millionaire with a stubborn streak which matched Bethany's. So who would win the battle of wills? Bethany had tried life as a rich man's plaything, and now she was determined to live the simple life. No frills or fuss, and definitely no men! But Chad had other ideas .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarlequin
    Release dateJul 15, 2011
    ISBN9781459263390
    Unavailable
    A Stranger's Love
    Author

    Laura Martin

    Born and bred on the South Coast of England into a family of two loving parents and a spirited older sister, books were a feature of Laura's life from early on. One of her earliest memories involves sitting with the family on a rainy Sunday afternoon listening to the exploits of a clumsy but lovable stuffed bear and his assorted cuddly friends. Laura's first ambition was to be a doctor, and in 2006 she went off to Guy's, King's and St Thomas' Medical school in London to study medicine. It was whilst she was earning her degree she discovered her love of writing. In between ward rounds and lectures Laura would scribble down ideas to work on later that evening and dream of being an author. In 2012 Laura married her high school sweetheart and together they settled down in Cambridgeshire. It was around this time Laura started focussing on the Romance genre, and found what she had always suspected to be true: she was a romantic at heart. Laura now spends her time writing Historical Romances when not working as a doctor.In her spare time Laura loves to lose herself in a book and has been known to read from cover to cover in a day when the story is particularly gripping. She also loves to travel with her husband, especially enjoying visiting historical sites and far flung shores

    Read more from Laura Martin

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    Reviews for A Stranger's Love

    3.5/5

    2,662 ratings155 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Our first title for the 2018-19 Book Club year. We read this as a "must read" in non-western literature and spent the time discussing the comparisons of loss of freedoms to the current American political trends. The authors parallels to these issues continue to be relevant.
    • 4/5
      Best for: People interested in one story of life under authoritarian governments.

      In a nutshell: A professor uses literature as the framework for her memoir of life teaching in Iran.

      Line that sticks with me: “Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.”

      Why I chose it: I flew the weekend after the election, and saw this in the airport. I figured perhaps it would be good to study up on life under leadership that doesn’t view everyone equally.

      Review: I’d heard about this book many times before, and thought it was all about a group of young girls who got together to read literature that they couldn’t access in other venues. That’s not entirely accurate. Instead it is the memoir of a professor that includes, in some parts, a group of women in their 20s getting together with the professor to discuss literature.

      The book is organized into four parts, each using an author as the background to the events. It does not go chronologically; it jumps around a bit, which I found somewhat challenging, although I think it ultimately works well.

      The book spends a lot of time exploring what it means to both receive an education and try to educate others with the implementing many strict rules. Dr. Nafisi spends a fair bit of time, for example, looking at what it would mean to follow the requirement to wear the veil, as she would not choose to wear one if it were not mandated. Is that a fight that it is worth undertaking if it means she would not be able to share her lectures with her students?

      I think one of the more shocking things for me was how almost casually the author discusses how many people – including some of her own students – are thrown in jail for years for seemingly minor issues. And then they are released and it’s … it’s a big deal but also not surprising. It’s terrifying, and I have to say that given the utterly despicable things the 45th president has done in just the last eight days, I don’t think it’s too ridiculous to think it could happen here, too.

      Before reading this book, I knew very little about Iran in the 80s and 90s. And obviously reading one book does not mean I know much more than I did before. But through the lovely writing of Dr. Nafisi, I feel like I understand some of the different perspectives of those living under the regime.
    • 5/5
      female teacher in Iran is forced out of her teaching position. She starts a literature study group for young women in her home. It's real. The meaning and power these women find in selected works of Western literature will stick with you. Also the real life description of what women lived with in Tehran in the 1980s is an education in itself
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this memoir of life in Iran, told in the context of Western literature. I'll admit, I did get lost in the vast cast of characters and the political situation, not to mention the in-depth literary discussions. But it was fascinating to learn more about life under the veil for Iranian women at the end of the last century. And some of the prose was just beautiful, it touched me deeply.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful!
    • 3/5
      Fascinating
    • 5/5
      A must for every bookclub member! Phenomenal read. It gets a little slow at times. Loved the author's link of the literature read (I love Gatsby) and the parallels she drew to the uncertain anc changing regime in Iran.
    • 5/5
      A professor of English Literature lives through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 with several of her students. Azar Nafisi narrates her life as a professor at Tehran University in the 1970's. As conservative Islam slowly takes over the culture, she invites several of her advanced students to her home to discuss books she is no longer allowed to teach. We get literary analysis, along with narrative about the various experiences these women have as their lives are changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always more narrowly. I was on the edge of my seat anticipating how each of these women would emerge from the Revolution.
    • 4/5
      In many ways this is a remarkable book. The author gives us an inside view of the frightening changes in Iran after the ouster of the shah, and weaves that view in with analyses of several of her favorite English-language authors, whose books she used when teaching literature in Tehran. She also tells the stories of several of her students. A brilliant structure, and yet I found her style to be so cool and removed that I couldn't really feel much emotional response, which for me was a drawback. Still, it's worth reading for the quality of the writing and for the firsthand experience of an educated, progressive woman in that environment.
    • 4/5
      So this is a beautifully tragic memoir of a literature professors experience during the revolution in Iran that occurred in the 1980's. It can be terribly dry at times, but throughout the entire book are startling quotes. You'll journey through the early days of the Iranian revolution and implementation of Sharia Law and the constant threat of the morality police. You'll hear heart rending stories of injustice done to women. You'll be encouraged and outraged at the strength these women have to have to merely survive in this time. You'll join a jury as The Great Gatsby is put on trial by students of literature, both praising and condemning the work. It's awful and wonderful, but not for the faint of heart; it takes a while to get through it.
    • 5/5
      The story of Iranian women's experiences under a totalitarian regime, told in a straightforward manner but supplemented by metaphors drawn from the Western literary canon. The author Azar Nafisi is well capable of this approach, given her Western education and background as a professor of English literature at Tehran University. Her story begins with an illicit reading group comprised of former students who met in her home in the mid-1990s, but soon moves back in time to cover her life in Iran from 1979 onward, relating the gradual tightening of controls over the country's population under Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. The timeline becomes muddied in places, but for the most part it is chronological.Through its clear prose and inviting method, this work has completely changed my image of Iran, its history and its people. I've long imagined Iran's people as hardline, but here the author describes 'Death to America' chants staged for western cameras by Iranian citizens forced or paid to participate. The Iranian Revolution was not an overnight success, resorting to force and murder in overcoming numerous protests and demonstrations by its unbelieving citizens, who even then did not foresee all that was coming: "To think that the universities could be closed down seemed as far-fetched as the possibility that women would finally succumb to wearing the veil." I derived the most benefit from the portions offering critical study of various classic novels. Magic happens when Western literature is interpreted through the eyes of these Iranian women, providing great insight into their society through the parallels drawn. Humbert Humbert's oppression of Lolita is likened to the totalitarian regime they suffer under; moral stances in The Great Gatsby are equated with the revolutionaries; the women of Henry James' novels serve as models for quiet defiance, etc. I'd strongly recommend having read the titles most closely studied in advance (or else you won't need to): Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Pride & Prejudice.
    • 1/5
      Booooorrrrriiiiiinnng.
    • 3/5
      I have such mixed feelings about this work. On one hand, there were moments when I was swept up in the narrative and feeling every breath of Nafisi's prose, and there were passages that worked to bring life and reading together in a way that made me see why the books were so necessary to the narrative. On the other hand, there were moments where I felt like I'd stepped into an undergraduate literature survey and was being lectured at, and there were also moments where I felt bored and/or frustrated with what felt like a lack of organization, and a very fragmented narrative.I suppose my largest frustration comes from the way that the discussions of literature were integrated so fully in some ways, and then ignored so completely in the ways that (I felt) mattered. There'd be whole passages from Nabokov, Fitzgerald and the other authors represented, along with explanations, explications, and discussions of the literature, as one would find in any good classroom covering the books. But, why were these discussions necessary in such complete detail here? Essentially, that's what I was left wondering. Perhaps some of the bits and pieces would be more necessary for a reader who is unfamiliar with the works--I'm really not sure, since I have read them--but my interest was in knowing how and why these books in particular mattered so much to the women at the center of the story. What was clear was why reading mattered, but why these books in particular? And how did they impact the women who were fully enmeshed in Tehran and its customs, as opposed to the academic author? This, I'm not at all sure of, though I'd expected it to be a large part of the work.At too many points, I felt like I was reading the equivalent of a journal put into prose, and that the only moves beyond that journal were attempts to explain the author's feelings about Austen, Nabokov, etc. But, for that, I could have read books about these authors and their books, as opposed to this memoir that I believed would allow for connection to another world and society, and to show the reach of these books. Yet, in the end, I'm afraid I was sorely disappointed.What can I say? Would I recommend this book? Probably not. Would I read another work by Nafisi? Again, probably not.
    • 3/5
      This is a very interesting book. I was fearful when it was picked as our book group choice. I read the Amazon blurb and I thought, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen and, horror of horrors, Henry James. How am I going to maintain interest in a book largely about books by these writers, none of whom, I would say that I am particularly knowledgeable about, or, indeed, interested in. But it proved easier than I feared. The book is much more about the author and her group of women and the nightmare of trying to live as an educated woman in Iran in the period after the Islamic Revolution. We have heard all about the repression, the Revolutionary Guards, et al, but this book individualises the problems and also points out the very real oddities (the presence of vast numbers of "illegal" satellite dishes). The weakness, for me, of the book was the lack of any real narrative thread, it jumps around too much, albeit over a limited period and I struggled to keep track of many of the individual women. Overall a worthwhile read, which I am sure will stimulate an interesting discussion at book group.
    • 4/5
      A splendid book, though never as good again as the first chapter. Interesting as lit crit as well as social comment re Iran.
    • 1/5
      This is one of those books I had high hopes for but fell flat for me. The subject - secretly reading classic works of fiction, banned under the Iranian regime in place at the time of the book - thrilled me and I am certainly impressed with Nafisi taking such a risk in more than difficult times. The let down, for me, was in the style of writing. I felt it very dry and not reflective of the urgency or risks being taken. It may be a book I return to for a second read. Sometimes books and timing of reading conflict.
    • 3/5
      Reading Lolita in Tehran is a fantastic piece of literary criticism. Nafisi tells the story of her life along with 4 books and authors: how they have influenced her ideas about the world around her, and how the world has shaped her understanding of the books. It's hard to imagine a better tribute to literature than to describe your life in dialog with your favorite authors. [p. 321]
    • 5/5
      Powerfully moving story.
    • 3/5
      My two words: self aggrandizement. This book is nothing more than literature lectures, and those are not even that interesting! Author's words: "I'm in academia and I like to pontificate." Not much about Lolita, but large amounts about Fitzgerald (the Great Gatsby) and James (Daisy Miller-literally like almost 100 pages). Meh 400 pages
    • 4/5
      I liked this more than I thought I would. There are major spoilers for some popular classics though! Most notably the Great Gatsby. I haven't read the book but I saw a play for it the Saturday before I started this and if I hadn't seen it then I would have been majorly spoiled and upset! Otherwise it was a very interesting insite to women in Iran.
    • 4/5
      Few memoirs have spoken to me or invoked such deep thought as this one. Like the author, I am an avid reader and I have read many of the same authors, if not the same books she discusses in this memoir. By relating how these works of literature took on new meanings as she taught and met with students in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the works themselves become richer and the lives of their readers take on an added beauty. The life of one's imagination is something Nafisi focuses on, to the extent that she eventually doesn't really seem to be living in Iran at all, but in the books she reads. Of course, this is a real story, not a fictional one, so it ends with a more real exit from a repressive land. If you love books and the experience of reading, I highly recommend this memoir.
    • 2/5
      A great premise wasted; the tone of the writing comes across as self-important. What I expected to be a book about a group of women taking risks to pursue something they loved, is actually a book about the author's career interspersed with her own abbreviated essays of various works of fiction. I would have liked to learn more about the women taking part in Nafisi's private literature class; instead we get mostly superficial commentary on them, which meant that I couldn't engage with any of the participants; a lack of engagement that meant I also wasn't that fussed about what happened to them, whereas the book, the premise, should have made me care.
    • 4/5
      Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was not the kind of book that I thought it would be. I assumed that it would be the story of the girls that got together to read every Thursday, and that the mention of Lolita in the title was for shock value, since it's such a controversial book. I should have taken the subtitle (A Memoir in Books) more seriously, since I think it is a great description. The book is Azar Nafisi's memoir, which includes the story of her Thursday morning classes, and a healthy dose of literary analysis.Azar Nafisi went from a revolutionary Iranian student in the U.S. to being a professor of English literature at the University of Tehran just after the revolution. She describes how the revolution changed Iran and herself, using liberal comparisons and allusions to the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James and Jane Austen and The Great Gatsby. She is extremely frank about her life, even about her initial naivete and her constant confusion about her life.Once I'd gotten over my expectations of what the book was going to be, I started to enjoy the book. It was still pretty slow reading; I couldn't focus on the book for long stretches. I think it was because of a few reasons. The first is that life under the Iranian regime sounded very tough, and I couldn't take reading about it for too long. Secondly, Nafisi's writing is very poetic, but also quite disjointed and jumps around a lot. Third, she was analysing a few books I hadn't read, and it seemed a bit dense to me. None of these reasons is a bad thing, of course.I think that Nafisi's way of writing really describes her very well – she frequently mentions being confused about what actions to take next and how to counsel her students, and her writing reflects that. She jumps between different time periods and between her interactions with different people. Her constant allusion to books, passages, quotes, characters, etc. was also really interesting – it is clear that she is a professor of literature through and through. As a person who has read a lot but has never taken a college English class, I found those sections of the book fascinating.I would have liked to read Henry James' books and The Great Gatsby before reading this one, since they're now fully spoiled for me. I would've gotten a lot more out of the analyses. I did enjoy the analysis of Lolita, and was disappointed that the "Austen" section didn't really talk much about her books.Originally posted on my blog.
    • 3/5
      Initially I wasn’t impressed by the author’s writing style. My biggest pet peeve was that the author often didn’t use quotes. This may be edgy and literary, but it also makes it annoyingly difficult to figure out who is talking or if the author is just thinking. The whole book was more literary and more academic than I anticipated. The author included a lot of literary criticism and I often found myself wishing she would focus more on her life story. Although the writing was beautiful and descriptive, it was also a little too abstract. Especially given my ignorance of the history of the middle east, the lack of hard facts was confusing. This was a book that gave me the feeling of a particular time and place, but little solid description of places and events.

      As I adjusted to the author’s writing style, I began to like it more. It truly is beautiful writing which shares emotions clearly. I think a book that can help you understand how people in circumstances very different from your own feel is always a valuable read. The stories of the author and the women in her class were all interesting. I was worried I would have a hard time when she discussed books I hadn’t read, but she shared just enough quotes and plenty of analysis so I never felt lost. I did learn at least a bit about Iran from the book and it encouraged me to look for more books set in the middle east. However, even after getting used to the author’s style, I still learned less about Iran than I would have liked because the book was written in such an academic, abstract way.

      This review first published at Doing Dewey.
    • 3/5
      Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is a memoir about life and Iran and reading English language books by Azar Nafisi. My alumni chapter book club selected this book appropriately about a book club Nafisi started to read Western literature with young women she had taught at the university in Tehran. The book is divided into four sections loosely draping Nafisi's story over the works of four authors: Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the works of Henry James (particularly Daisy Miller), and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The first section focuses mainly on the reading group and the conversations therein, while the reamaining three sections are more of a straight-forward memoir. Nafisi is educated in America (in Oklahoma, no less, which she makes sound like a hotbed of Iranian revolutionaries), returns to teach in Tehran right at the time of the revolution, loses her positions due to her liberal ways, returns to teaching (albeit compromising some of her principles), and then starts the reading group. Finally, Nafisi departs Iran for good for the United States where she teaches and writes to this day.This is horribly judgmental of me, especially to say of someone who lived under a totalitarian regime, but I found that Nafisi comes across as whiny, at least in the first chapter. Marjane Satrapi (who is roughly the age of one of Nafisi's "girls") writes much more eloquently about the Iranian Revolution and the oppression of the Islamic regime, especially for women. The discussion of the books and life issues by the women of the reading group is supposed to be central to this work, but I never get the sense of individuality of the women in the group as if they're only there to fill a role for Nafisi's thesis. I warmed up to this book in the second section when Nafisi's class puts the novel The Great Gatsby on trial, a clever way of discussing the book and the clash of cultures of the students in reading it. Nafisi is at her best when discussing the books and I found her observations quite illuminating. Especially for Lolita which I read many years ago but didn't really follow it all to well. I think Nafisi must be an excellent teacher and her passion for the novels comes across well in this work. Ultimately this is a pretty good book, especially for its literary sections as well as a glimpse into life in modern Iran.

      Favorite Passages

      In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiousity about other poeple and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. I reminded them of Humbert's statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on "an islnd of entranced time," a task undertaken only by Gods and poets. - p. 48-49The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. - p. 76This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabakov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost. - p. 224
    • 4/5
      A memoir of the author's time spent teaching modern Western classics in Iran at a time when they were forbidden. This book had several layers of interest for me. First and foremost, was the opportunity to see the women under the chador as the individuals they are. To find out that they have voices, intelligence and opinions just like the rest of us. Second, to learn about how these modern Western works of fiction were understood and interpreted by a people who are so different in their beliefs and politics from Western culture. Third, the insight into how a people can desire change in their government, put their whole hearts and soul into that change, and then see it go so terribly wrong. Fourth, the author's insight into the novels themselves, the strength she gained from them, and her growth and survival as an individual in a political and religious climate which desired to remove her individuality.I have only read The Great Gatsby, and some of the works of Jane Austen, of the authors mentioned by Nafisi. At first I thought that would be a big drawback, but I found that she described and illuminated the characters and settings of the novels she spoke about in such a way that I did not feel in the dark. I did find it difficult to follow her timeline. This memoir is set up like memories, characters and events are somewhat fluid, so if you are looking for a detailed history of the changes and revolution in Iran during the 1990s, this isn't it. If you are wondering how that revolution affected the people who lived through it, at least the educated ones in the cities and at the universities, this is it.
    • 4/5
      Azar Nafisi bookends her memoir with stories of her special class, a group of women who met at her house to talk about texts that were forbidden. Together they read Nabokov and Austen, Gatsby and Daisy Miller. In the middle is Nafisi's memories of involvement in the '70s revolution, teaching in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Islamic Republic taking away more and more freedoms.I first read this book about ten years ago, and when I was looking for a new audiobook I thought it was a good time for a reread. Since the first time I read the book, my own knowledge of Iran has improved, and I've read another book or two that is covered in the text. There are four parts divided into several chapters; the chronology is confusing at best, and very often Nafisi chooses to forgo quotation marks. This was less noticeable in the audio, when I could tell from the narrator's voice who was talking, but it was frustrating to read. I enjoyed some of their comments about the literature I've read, but now that I'm reasonably sure I won't read the others, I was less enthralled with the books I hadn't read and how she draws parallels or contrasts with her and her students' lives. And really, it was much less about the books than what I remembered. Nafisi writes much more about her personal experiences, and changes information about the students to protect their privacy (an understandable choice, but one which nonetheless kept me wondering what was "made up" and what was "real"). Recommended if you're interested in Iranian memoirs and literary criticism.
    • 5/5
      WONDERFUL. I would read this again.
    • 2/5
      The subject while intersting, did not survive the voice of the pretentious snob reading it (a combination of the Author and the Audio Book Voice). It was very hard to get past the British snooty voice in the Audio book and combine that with an Author who tries to write as descriptive as Nabokov but fails miserable. This should have been a story that was heartwarming and intriguing but it just shows that every culture has the book snob who thinks they can write. This is one of those.
    • 4/5
      Wow, I really hope things have changed in Iran since this book was written. It was like reading a real life version of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. *shudder*