Strand of a Thousand Pearls: A Novel

For fans of Isabelle Allende and Laura Esquivel, here is the sensuous, spellbinding story of the Azizyan family—a story of love, marriage, and mischief by the bestselling, award-winning Dorit Rabinyan.

In the years leading up to Iran’s marriage, her mother weaves one long strand of pearls into a wedding dress, lovingly unraveled by the husband Iran finds one night down by the sea. Solly is a fisherman, shy, clumsy, and burning with love for his young bride, and with all but a thousand of these pearls, they buy a tiny flat in a house shaded by guava trees.

First comes Maurice, with a weak heart, then Sofia, Marcelle, and Lizzie, whose body is cursed with appetites, and mischievous Matti, who mourns her missing twin. At night, Iran coaxes her daughters to sleep with stories of their wedding nights, as they take turns conjuring dreams of the love that the future holds.

Redolent with the scent of lilac, white musk, and oleander trees, and bursting with the flavors of passion fruit, quinces, and overripe plums, Strand of a Thousand Pearls is the story of the imagined and actual marriages of the Azizyan girls, their years of yearning, restless and impatient, and the truth of their engagements, miles away from the enchanted realm and imaginary heroes of their dreams.

Four years ago, Dorit Rabinyan burst onto the scene with Persian Brides, a novel that established her as a writer of incandescent spirit with a gift for spinning wry, magical tales about the vagaries of love and marriage. In Strand of a Thousand Pearls, she has given us a bittersweet fable about desires fulfilled and denied—about married love and carnal love, about a mother’s love and the kind of love that vanishes one night without warning like an evaporated dream.

Dorit Rabinyan was born in Kefar-Saba, Israel, to Persian parents and wrote her first novel, Persian Brides, at twenty-one. An award-winning international bestseller translated into ten languages, Persian Brides established her as the voice of a new generation in Israel. Rabinyan won the Israeli Film Academy Award for best television drama of 1997 for Shuli’s Fiancé, and the Eshkol Prize for her second novel, Strand of a Thousand Pearls. She lives in Tel Aviv.