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Bantam
September 2008
On Sale: August 26, 2008
560 pages
ISBN: 0553807323
EAN: 9780553807325
Hardcover
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Historical
From the internationally bestselling author of The
Wedding Officer comes a novel whose stunning blend of
exotic adventure and erotic passion will intoxicate every
reader who tastes of its remarkable delights.
When a woman gives a man coffee, it is
a way of showing her desire.
—Abyssinian proverb
It was a cup of coffee that changed Robert Wallis’s
life—and a cup of very bad coffee at that. The impoverished
poet is sitting in a London coffeehouse contemplating an
uncertain future when he meets Samuel Pinker. The owner of
Castle Coffee offers Wallace the very last thing a
struggling young artiste in fin de siècle England
could possibly want: a job.
But the job Wallis
accepts—employing his palate and talent for words to compose
a “vocabulary of coffee” based on its many subtle and
elusive flavors—is only the beginning of an extraordinary
adventure in which Wallis will experience the dizzying
heights of desire and the excruciating pain of loss. As
Wallis finds himself falling hopelessly in love with his
coworker, Pinker’s spirited suffragette daughter Emily, both
will discover that you cannot awaken one set of senses
without affecting all the others.
Their love is
tested when Wallis is dispatched on a journey to North
Africa in search of the legendary Arab mocca. As he
travels to coffee’s fabled birthplace—and learns the
fiercely guarded secrets of the trade—Wallis meets Fikre,
the defiant, seductive slave of a powerful coffee merchant,
who serves him in the traditional Abyssinian coffee
ceremony. And when Fikre dares to slip Wallis a single
coffee bean, the mysteries of coffee and forbidden passion
intermingle…and combine to change history and fate.
Comments
1 comment posted.
Re: The Various Flavors of Coffee
Anthony Capella, The Various Flavors of Coffee, 2008.
I have just read this delightful book. Seemingly light-weight at the outset, perhaps, it gives the reader a colorful peep into the late 19th century coffee trade between London and East Africa, the source of the word kaffe. And there is a parallel plot revealing the struggles toward women's suffrage in England. Over all this, the author gives us a steady stream of clever humor, sexually explicit adventure, cut-throat enterprise, and keen insight into the matter of coffee blending and the resultant tastes.
The main character is Robert Wallis, at twenty-two years of age a bit of a fop. The kind of guy who would turn first to the New York Times Styles section and be there all morning; by the conclusion, he is Indiana Jones.
Through a lovely lass and some hope of marriage (and a life of luxury), he becomes involved with a coffee entrepreneur and the European military and economic intrusion upon Africa. The management of geographic place names is often a challenge.
The coffee magnate, a diabolical schemer working toward "free market capitalism" named Pinker, sends Wallis to Zeila (or, Zeilah) on the Gulf of Aden, to Harar (just east of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia or Abyssinia, the birthplace of arabica coffee), and well beyond.
En route, he experiences the magnificent Egyptian dawn and Cairo's scented whorehouses, the highly sophisticated and meaningful Ethiopian three-course coffee ceremony, the realities of East African slavery, and a sharp introduction to the culture and values that continue today in East Africa and the challenges that defeat attempts at nationhood, sustainable economic balance, and peace.
Ethiopian Longberry or Yirgacheffe, anyone?
Setting forth in such a place toward establishing a profitable coffee plantation is potentially dangerous work and Wallis makes keeps us on our toes by dallying with forbidden women and not only learning how to cope, but also to appreciate life in the
(Willard B. Moore 6:55pm August 16, 2009)
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