The Various Flavours of Coffee

Book excerpt: It is a cup of coffee that changes Robert Wallis’s life — and a very bad cup of coffee at that. The impoverished poet is sitting in a London coffeehouse contemplating an uncertain future when he meets Samuel Pinker. The coffee merchant offers Wallis a job employing his palate and talent for words to compose a “vocabulary of coffee” based on its many subtle and elusive flavours. As Willis finds himself falling hopelessly in love with his coworker, Pinker’s spirited daughter Emily. 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.