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. I t is 1895. Robert Wallis, would-be poet, bohemian and impoverished dandy, accepts a commission from coffee merchant Samuel Pinker to categorise the different tastes of coffee - and encounters Pinker?s free-thinking daughters, Philomenia, Ada and Emily.  As romance blossoms with Emily, Robert realises that the Muse and marriage may not be incompatible after all.  Sent to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the coffee trade, he becomes obsessed with a negro slave girl, Fikre.  He decides to use the money he has saved to buy her from her owner - a decision that will change not only his own life, but the lives of the three Pinker sisters ...

I finished The Various Flavours of Coffee just this morning. I was at the part about Emily going to prison last night and had to finish it first thing this morning over, of course, a cup of coffee.  What can I say...this book makes want to become an aficianado of all things coffee.  I loved coffee before but now I really am in love with it. I will now search for "the various flavours of coffee" in every cup...I also enjoyed the enthusiasm with which Robert enjoyed other things.

The Various Flavours of Coffee is a great book.  The history of coffee, the start of a new century and era of business and thinking in erotic London and details of the suffragette movement was compelling reading.  In 1893, New Zealand was the first in the world to give women the vote of which we are very proud and reminds us that it did not come easily and has yet to come for so many women of the world.  It also reminded me why I buy free trade coffee and that business practices have not improved over the past 100 years.

Is that the way Nature created us and the coffee/cappuccino...Intrigues of Nature?  You have really succeded exceedingly well (indeed, better than many spiritual gurus!) in proving, that in the course of growing up, one must realize the limitations of unfettered sensuality and hedonism!

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