Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood is excited to welcome Elif Shafak to the store to discuss and sign her newest book The Forty Rules of Love on Wednesday, March 3rd, at 7pm. Elif Shafak (spelled Şafak in Turkish) was born in 1971 in Strasbourg, France. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Throughout her life, Shafak has lived in cities and states all over the world including Madrid, Spain; Ankara, Turkey; Cologne, Germany; Amman, Jordan; Boston, Massachusetts; Michigan; and Arizona. Through it all she has maintained a deep attachment to the city of Istanbul, which plays an important part in her fiction. As a result, a sense of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has consistently characterized both her life and her work. Shafak has published nine books, seven of which are novels. She writes in both Turkish and English. In Turkey, her latest novel, The Forty Rules of Love, instantly became a number one bestseller after selling more than 150,000 copies in a month. The novel is a modern love story between a Jewish-American housewife and a modern Sufi living in Amsterdam. Their unusual romance is interwoven with the remarkable spiritual bond between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Sufism has always played an important role in Shafak’s writing, but it was in this book that she dealt with the subject directly.