Forty-year-old Ella Rubenstein is an ordinary unhappy housewife with three children and an unfaithful husband > but her life begins to change dramatically when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agency. Her first assignment is a novel intriguingly titled Sweet Blasphemy > about the thirteenth-century poet Rumi and his beloved Sufi teacher Shams of Tabriz. The author is an unknown first-time novelist > Aziz Zahara > who lives in Turkey. Initially reluctant to take on a book about a time and place so different from her own > Ella soon finds herself captivated both by the novel and the man who wrote it > with whom she begins an e-mail flirtation. As she reads > she begins to question the many ways she has settled for a conventional life devoid of passion and real love.